NatWest appoints first chief AI research officer

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Pantic currently serves as Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London, having previously been founding research director of Samsung AI Research Centre in Cambridge, and AI scientific research director at Meta London.

At NatWest, Pantic will be tasked with developing AI use cases for multimodal AI in combatting depfake threats and Generative AI. This will entail the progressive roll out of AI for bank-wide simplification via the development of tools for improving productivity.

Scott Marcar, CIO of NatWest Group, says: “It’s not the first time I’ve said that AI is helping us to be a simpler NatWest and to transform our customers’ experiences as we become even more of a trusted partner in the moments that matter most. Maja’s appointment is another important and exciting milestone; her unique skills and experience will help us adapt and meet customers’ changing needs faster, and more effectively, whilst complementing our team’s existing capabilities.”

The appointment builds on recent momentum in NatWest’s AI strategy, including its recent collaboration with OpenAI, the roll-out of the bank’s internal GenAI platform to all staff, and success in how it operates and serves customers through virtual assistant tools like Cora+ and AskArchie+.

The bank claims the GenAI functionality offered by Cora+ has shown a 150% improvement in customer satisfaction, while reducing the number of times a colleague needs to intervene, with similar benefits with Ask Archie+, where up to 75% of HR queries no longer need human intervention.