AI in FinTech: Andy Mason, COO of NatWest Boxed
We recently spoke with Andy Mason, COO of NatWest Boxed to understand how they're leveraging AI.
NatWest Boxed is a leading UK Banking-as-a-Service provider and the technology solution behind Mettle, NatWest’s digital bank account for small businesses. NatWest Boxed has recently announced a deal with The AA (press release) which will allow The AA to offer own-brand financial products embedded into their customer journeys.
AI in the business
FinTech Profile believes that all businesses, but especially FinTechs, should be using AI within their business to make efficiency savings. We asked Andy what NatWest Boxed is doing with AI:
“The strategy that we've adopted is really threefold. Firstly, we are looking at what value we can get out of Gen AI that is provided through our current vendors, like a SaaS proposition. The second one is, what can we build ourselves? And what does that mean for the organisation? And because we’re part of the NatWest Group, the third element is can we harness any of the work that NatWest has already been doing in this space?”
“We have hundreds of technology vendors, all doing very specific things for us, and I'd say that a good 50 to 60% of them offer AI tooling that we can toggle on.”
However, although AI adoption will provide value, it needs to be done at the right pace – a rush to benefit from short-term savings may result in long-term pains. NatWest Boxed, correctly in our opinion, concentrated on the governance of AI within the organisation.
“Before introducing any AI tools, we created governance processes to ensure the tooling is safe from a data perspective, that it meets our privacy and risk appetite as well as any ethical considerations. Now we have the governance in place, we can move quickly and safely. We knew that establishing the governance process was going to be challenging, people sometimes consider it to be boring, but it was the right thing to do first. We knew we needed it to prevent us from making bad decisions, we also knew it would speed things up in the longer term.”
It’s one thing to talk about adopting AI within the business, but what is key is what that means in practice and which AI tools are the first ones to be adopted.
“One of the first things we did in the vendor space was turning on GitHub Copilot… and we can see an immediate 5% productivity gain. With 300 engineers, that’s pretty big. We expect that to go up over the next six months, maybe as high as 30%.”
“The next one we implemented was Gemini. We use Google Suite every day, Gemini comes as part of the enterprise licence and, though it operates on all the same permissions as the rest of our stack, we didn’t enable it immediately, we took it through the governance process to ensure we considered all the risks. We got comfortable and now, every employee, regardless of job title, gets Gemini – at the moment we’re using the native features mainly for things like the app for research, taking notes, summarising and answering questions.
We also use the Google Cloud Platform for all of our analytics. Our data scientists love it, because 90% of their brain power is taken up with backend queries and it just does it. That's been a big win for us. We’re exploring the wider opportunities Gemini brings through the APIs that connect data sets, we’re taking our time with that to get value in the right areas.”
Our view is that NatWest Boxed has been very sensible in its rollout of AI – a focus on governance first; then deploy the existing AI services from their large suppliers; measure and then improve the efficiencies from those deployments; then look for more options. Almost a textbook adoption of AI.
AI powering the service
The true potential of AI is in more than just business efficiencies, however, it’s in harnessing its capabilities within your service offering, or updating, augmenting, or even changing your offering thanks to the power of AI.
At the moment, this isn’t a big priority for NatWest Boxed.
“At the moment we’re focusing on productivity type stuff [that we’re using AI for]. I think that there's much more that we can do as we get bigger but I think our strategy is right for this stage of our journey.”
The Regulators’ view of AI
Some of the slow adoption of AI within FinTech services is because of direct regulation, or a fear of future regulation. FinTech Profile’s understanding is that, slowly, global regulators are becoming more open to the idea of AI.
The future of AI in FinTech
Finally, a look into the future. FinTech Profile believes that AI will play some part in the service offering of almost every FinTech service, but that probably won’t be from ‘off-the-shelf’ AI providers. AI will instead be baked into the service, driven by and created to solve the exact needs of the business and its market. AI will not be a separate sector, but a business tool, built internally by FinTechs as an integral part of the coding of their services.
“It's going to be a brave new world, certainly in the next few years, but in my opinion, within the next 12 months, we're going to see fundamental shifts with the use of AI becoming part of nearly everything we do in everyday life .”
“We have built our own large language models. They are live and engineers are starting to play around with them and use them for different things... [soon] we will see much more strategic value, whether it's a commercial model, it's research, or engineers using it for engineering, [but] it will become more and more ubiquitous in our operating model.”
And in this way, AI is more than just time and cost savings for organisations. It becomes about new skillsets, new offerings, and attacking new segments and markets. AI can help FinTech businesses solve new problems. That is the way NatWest Boxed is going.
“The decision we've made about the extra capacity AI generates is quite straightforward - we need to reinvest it, because we've got too much work to do.”
Thank you for taking the time to speak, Andy!
Reach out to Andy via his LinkedIn Profile and read more about NatWest Boxed at https://www.nwboxed.com.