NatWest: Gen AI chatbot pilot delivering 150% increase in customer satisfaction

Ewan MacLeod

06 Jan 2025 — 2 min read

Screenshot from the NatWest Cora homepage

You may recall some of my recent posts about the mighty NatWest and their Conversational AI chatbot, Cora.

Well, reader Michal highlighted this report from the team at Finextra which makes for interesting reading if you're keen to know more about NatWest's ongoing journey.

The report is titled "The Future of AI in Financial Services in 2025" and it's available as a free download from their website (supported by the teams at Box, Innovate Finance and RedCompass Labs).

There's a lot of stimulating points in the report, but it's always useful having quotable numbers (even if they're a little opaque – this is the banking industry, after all).

The report quotes Graham Smith, NatWest's Head of Data Science & Innovation on the topic of launching a Gen AI pilot with Cora:

“Since the launch of that pilot in June, we’ve seen a 150% increase in customer satisfaction, and a halving in the number of cases requiring colleagues to intervene.”

That's good news.

The report continues:

As well as enabling personalisation, Smith spoke to the overall strength of the banking industry in leveraging AI, as it “has both huge amounts of data and the ongoing need to evolve its customer proposition, and so the opportunities for AI to enhance service levels and efficiencies is perhaps more significant than a lot of other sectors.”

You can read a bit more about Cora's 12-week Gen AI Pilot. I think it's fair to say that whilst it's obviously paying some dividends, you can't be logging on to Cora and asking it for recipe advice, or help with your homework. One would imagine the bank's LLM shield is helping there.

I am looking forward to hearing more information about NatWest Cora. I know there are lots of banks and insurance companies closely following any Cora metrics for clues to help drive their own implementation strategies.

I think I'm right in writing that Cora is one of the largest Conversational AI implementations in Europe in Financial Services, certainly in terms of the scale of NatWest (19M customers) and the number of customers able to access it.

Congratulations Team Cora at NatWest and keep the updates coming please!

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