NatWest CEO Says AI Will Take Over Some Existing Banking Roles

NatWest CEO Paul Thwaite said artificial intelligence (AI) is going to change the bank’s workforce, though he didn’t say whether it would reduce the size, Finextra reported Friday (June 19).

Speaking at a business summit hosted by The Times, Thwaite said, per the report: “In effect there will be roles that currently exist that absolutely to all intents and purposes [will be] delivered by AI.”

The Daily Mail also reported on Thwaite’s remarks and added that NatWest employs a growing number of people in roles related to software and AI.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race” found that 85% of financial services and insurance firms with at least $1 billion in annual revenue plan to increase their AI budgets over the next 12 months.

The most adopted AI tasks among these firms are revenue recognition and accounting close, credit risk assessment and scoring, and sales forecasting and pipeline optimization. The share of firms using AI for these tasks was gauged at 65%, 60% and 60%, respectively, according to the report.

“The industry’s most adopted use cases cluster in structured, auditable back-office functions: the internal operations that keep a business running but that customers never directly see,” the report said.

PYMNTS reported June 2 that Nvidia’s State of AI in Financial Services: 2026 Trends report that nearly 90% of financial institutions are deploying or assessing AI and that 65% already use it.

It was reported Thursday (June 18) that Denis Roux, Deutsche Bank’s chief information officer, investment bank, said that AI is enabling the bank to cut the completion time of some tasks from two years to as little as three months.

Roux said in the report that Deutsche Bank uses simpler models for routine tasks, is cautious about deploying AI for everything, and is currently developing AI tools to automate the extraction and analysis of financial data and to link external events to the bank’s portfolio to gauge its exposure.

JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said in May that the bank may eventually hire more AI experts than bankers.

“I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” Dimon said. “There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories, and it will make them more productive.”

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