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Making it personal

There’s so much to be proud of when it comes to our mobile banking app. When it was launched in May 2011, it was the world’s first fully functioning banking app. In its first six months, we had over a million users sign up to the service and more than £1 billion was transferred using the app.

At first, it was a relatively simple (yet at the time, ground-breaking) service. Whereas now, almost 14 years on, the app is capability-rich and as a result is highly-rated among customers. On a feature-by-feature basis, it’s one of the most advanced apps in the market and is designed to put customers at the centre of their own banking experience.

But we believe we can always take the bank’s digital offering further. And this year will bring big changes for our mobile app. We’re accelerating beyond a period of simply making all our services digital, and into the era of smarter, more engaging, more personalised digital banking.  

There’s an opportunity for us to be much more proactive and personalised about connecting our customers to the things they need.

Meeting our customers’ needs

Our 10.5 million app users have incredibly diverse financial lives and our vision is for everyone’s app to be just for them. There’s an opportunity for us to be much more proactive and personalised about connecting our customers to the things they need, in the right ways and at the right moments. So how are we driving this?

We’re doing it in a number of ways: through meaningful personalisation; streamlining user journeys between different parts of the app; and by creating new points of engagement, such as helpful ‘calls to action’.

So far, we’ve refreshed the design of the app’s home screen to make it even easier for customers to see all of their accounts at a glance and to quickly rename and reorder them to suit their needs. We’ve also taken big steps forward in how we help our customers visualise and analyse their spending. This is thanks to more advanced data analytics in the background, simpler summaries, and by positioning insights more contextually alongside customers’ account transactions.

Throughout the year, we’ll be launching even more useful changes that enable customers to have greater insight and control of their spending. I’m particularly excited about the introduction of configurable ‘widgets’, where customers can put their most-used app functions on their home screen and see key information of their choosing at a glance. 

Our new mobile app features

Investing in simplification

The evolution of the app is aligned to NatWest Group’s strategic priority of simplification. By digitising key customer journeys and streamlining and modernising our technology estate, we’re focusing on making things easier for both colleagues and customers.

Ongoing investment in new technology has allowed us to roll out these changes incrementally, ensuring that we’re delivering a brilliant experience and learning and evolving as part of the process.

We’re also embracing the increasing role of AI – bringing the power of machine learning to how we support our customers. The bar for digital interactions is growing ever higher, and investment in our technology, guided by our AI and Data Ethics Code of Conduct, has the ambition to offer smarter personalisation and new forms of relevance in a transparent and responsible way.

I firmly believe we can help make it easier for our customers to achieve their financial goals.

Putting customers in the centre

It’s clearly a year of big change for the app. But while we’re making the app’s functionality easier to use and more personalised, we haven’t lost sight of the fact that changes – however useful – can often take some time to adjust to.

We are therefore launching features gradually so we can gather feedback and test and learn with our customers, making quick iterations in response to what we hear. Importantly, we’ve also been working closely across our Digital, Design, Marketing and Frontline teams to help bring customers and colleagues with us on the journey.

We know that with 93% of customer needs now being met digitally, it’s imperative we keep doing this – investing in technology and iterating our digital offering to make sure we keep it relevant for our customers. And by evolving the app through our customer research and ongoing test-and-learn approach, I firmly believe we can help make it easier for our customers to achieve their financial goals.

Ultimately, we’ll succeed with customers by improving the way they feel when they bank digitally with us. But creating that feeling doesn’t happen by accident. It comes through carefully-considered, easy-to-use products and functionality which put customers at the centre of their financial world. 

The material published on this page is for information purposes only and should not be regarded as providing any specific advice, or used by consumers to make financial decision. Terms and conditions apply to any products or services mentioned.

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