Read more about our ambition to be a leading bank in the UK helping to address the climate challenge.
Overlay
Learning
Building Financial Capability
We champion the potential of people and families at every stage of their lives. By working to create a society which is financially confident and resilient, we want to empower people to take control of their finances and their futures, and to make the most of their money.
Our ambition
- 15m financial capability interactions delivered between 1 January 2020 and 31 Dec 2023(1)
- 2m additional customers helped to start saving between 1 January 2020 and 31 Dec 2023(2)
- 50% colleague elective learning focused on future skills by end of 2023(4)
- 1,100 graduates, interns and apprentices hired in 2022, including our social mobility programme
How we put learning into action
- Helping young people to thrive
1. MoneySense has helped 11.5million young people learn about money since it launched in 1994. More about MoneySense
2. NatWest Thrive - a programme for 8 to 18-year-olds that aims to help them develop their self-belief as well as their money confidence; reaching more than 800 young people across the UK during 2022.
- Savings - Developing a savings habit is an essential element of building financial resilience, and this year we introduced Round Ups to our suite of savings and investment products. More about our Savings
- Launched a benefits calculator as part of the Cost of Living Hub
- 35% colleague elective learning focussed on future skills at end of 2022
- Early career programme - True to our purpose of championing potential, we are investing in building future talent capability through our early career programme. In 2022, we hired 1,135 graduates, interns and apprentices, including 171 apprentices from a lower-income socio-economic background and 10 interns from underprivileged communities in India.
- In 2022, we also launched our new Financial Crime graduate and intern programme with the first graduate intake scheduled for September 2023. We plan to increase our graduate, intern and apprentice intake for 2023.
Supporting the employability of customers, communities and young people
- CareerSense - We supported 16,136 young people in 2022 through our CareerSense programme (over 24,000 since launch in June 2021). This included providing schools with workshops and lesson plans which have supported 14,746 young people (13-to-18-year-olds). As part of this work, we launched CareerSense Dream Bigger during National Careers Week in March 2022, of which we were also the headline sponsor. We continued to support 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training through CareerSense Find Your Path. The programme includes co-created skills workshops delivered in local communities with youth partners, mentoring with a bank colleague, and a paid placement. To date we have enrolled 72 young people in the programme. We also sponsor 16 to 18-year-olds with purpose-led leadership development through the Ivy House Award, and in 2022 we enrolled 1,168 students to work towards the award. We also continued our social mobility collaboration, supporting 120 16–18-year-old students through either an insight week or paid work experience. As part of Entrepreneurship Week in November 2022, we piloted our “Idea Accelerator” scheme for 16- to 18-year-olds, further developing entrepreneurial skills with 30 young people in London.
- In November 2021, we launched Learning with NatWest, our external learning academy which supports communities, families and businesses (both customers and non-customers) and focuses on five key capabilities: climate, employability, entrepreneurship, future skills and financial capability. During 2022, there were over 56,000 visitors to the website and we also launched our Learning with NatWest podcast series.
(1) Includes additional initiatives approved during 2021 and 2022 which met the criteria for inclusion in the financial capability target
(2) Includes instances where customers had savings with other banks and transferred them to their NatWest Group account.
(3) Includes additional 144k customers for 2021 and 2020. The customers helped to start to save criteria were revised in April 2022 to reflect products aligned to the ambition.
(4) Starting from May 2022.
(*) Within the scope of EY assurance. Refer to page 70 of 2022 ESG Supplement (PDF 9.6MB).
