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Tell me about the Innovation & Partnerships team at NatWest Group

The sheer pace of change today – both technological and societal – means our 20 million customers are navigating an increasingly complex world. In response to these challenges, NatWest Group is committed to understanding and anticipating their evolving needs, ensuring we help them succeed both now and in the future.

The role of the Innovation & Partnerships team is to understand and translate what this change means for our customers and the bank. By keeping our finger on the pulse externally we can ensure that we're focusing on the right areas of development internally – whether that's experimenting safely to better understand and harness new technologies, partnering with innovative companies, making minority investments or building meaningful new ventures. 

These activities enable NatWest Group to deepen knowledge, generate new ideas, and access cutting-edge technology, ensuring customers can make progress towards their goals with the right services and expertise.

Give me an example of a recent initiative led by the team

A recent example of this is the launch of FourTwoThree, a smart climate action platform designed to help businesses of all sizes realise tangible commercial value across various supply chains.

FourTwoThree was developed through a unique collaboration between NatWest Group, National Australia Bank, and Standard Chartered Ventures, and is aimed at addressing a common challenge: enabling businesses to measure, understand, and effectively reduce their overall climate impact.

By leveraging insights from proven market propositions including the Carbon Planner SME carbon assessment tool that Innovation & Partnerships delivered with NatWest’s Commercial and Institutional Bank three years ago, the project partners created a platform that allows large institutions to access reliable climate data, bottom up. This not only provides a competitive advantage but also enhances risk management and ensures compliance with emerging reporting standards.

The platform enables these institutions to deliver climate support to their SME customers and suppliers through an easy-to-use digital solution. It automates footprint calculations and empowers SMEs with personalised guidance and recommendations.

In 2025, we launched our NatWest Fintech Growth Programme as a vehicle to unlock new opportunities to serve customers and demonstrate our commitment to the UK innovation economy.

How is the team unlocking fintech innovation?

To meet the rapidly changing needs of our customers, we partner with and invest in companies developing new technology. A significant part of this involves working with financial technology (fintech) firms.

In 2025, we launched our NatWest Fintech Growth Programme as a vehicle to unlock new opportunities to serve customers and demonstrate our commitment to the UK innovation economy. The programme brings together fintechs exploring the future landscape of payments together with senior leaders from across the bank to share insights and explore how working together could create joint impact. For the fintechs, NatWest Group offers a potential route to scale with 20 million customers.

Among the cohort of fintechs that joined the programme are Tunic Pay, who provide payment intelligence helping to transform the digital payment journey and better identify and combat future fraud threats; and Sprive who help to enable mortgage overpayment by automatically setting money aside based on your spending.

Tell us more about some of the bank’s minority investments.

Minority investments in strategically aligned start-ups help us stay ahead of technological and innovation shifts. They also enable us to unlock commercial opportunities by deepening engagement with both existing and new customer segments, while fostering a culture of innovation throughout the bank. Through these efforts, we are helping to position the bank as both future-ready and customer-focused.

For instance, the minority stake in Yonder we announced in April 2025 represents a significant step in our journey of innovating with early-stage companies.

Yonder offers a financial lifestyle platform that provides its members with a range of unique personalised rewards by partnering with local businesses and aspirational brands. This investment will enable Yonder to scale, while reinforcing our aim to enhancing customers overall banking experience, and gain deeper insights into emerging trends within these important customer segments.

This follows other strategic investments, including Serene, an early-stage artificial intelligence platform dedicated to addressing financial vulnerability.

Investing in Serene

Our investment in AI platform Serene is helping us detect the early sings of financial distress. 

More on our investment

Serene progressed through the NatWest Accelerator, our free programme for UK entrepreneurs to scale their businesses, offering coaching, a peer community, and access to experts and potential investors. Using real-time customer insights, driven by AI and behavioural science, Serene detects early signs of financial distress and predicts risks, enabling financial institutions to provide personalised and timely support at scale.

Partnering with and experimenting alongside Serene has the potential to refine NatWest Group’s existing models, improve customer insights and enhance financial support, while also offering opportunities for cross-industry collaboration through Serene’s networks. In turn, Serene benefits from NatWest Group’s expertise in financial wellbeing and technology, as well as funding to help its team grow and tackle the market opportunity. 

Agentic AI is changing how customers will interact with services, and offers enhanced autonomy, adaptability and decision-making.

What are the opportunities in the future?

Understanding the technological disruptions that are influencing consumer habits can unlock future opportunities in banking, and there are a few key trends that are reshaping financial services:

Agentic AI is changing how customers will interact with services, and offers enhanced autonomy, adaptability and decision-making to achieve complex goals with limited human input. These systems offer more personalised experiences, faster responses, and seamless interactions across channels creasing embedding of AI into everyday tasks.

Coupled with this, consumer tech is changing rapidly as we evolve beyond screens and towards wearable devices. Extended reality glasses are merging the digital with the physical, offering immersive experiences without the need for a display. Financial services will become embedded in daily life, redefining traditional touchpoints and customer engagement.

Then you have technologies like tokenisation and digital assets that are creating new digital markets with real-time, low-cost transactions and unprecedented personalisation with AI only amplifying this potential.

And finally, quantum computing has the potential to revolutionise banking. It’s a radically different approach to computing that can tackle problems far beyond the reach of classical machines, with significant real-world applications in areas such as nonlinear equations, materials science and climate modelling.

At NatWest Group we want to understand how each of these technologies will impact our customers’ lives and how they can be harnessed to better meet our their rapidly changing needs.   

David Grunwald

David is Director of Innovation and Partnerships at NatWest Group.

Follow David on LinkedIn

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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