Big interview
Above: With some 62,500 employees as of last year, NatWest’s staff is one of the biggest in the country.
Above right: From its HQ at 250 Bishopsgate, NatWest has long been one of the City’s most prominent financial institutions.
Below: Despite encouraging workers to return to the office, NatWest retains many of the WFH policies that started during the pandemic.
use our platforms – and how our colleagues use them,” the CIO explains. “It’s very much an integrated set of teams that really drives that.” And if that’s a point confirmed by NatWest’s various B2C projects, it’s also surely apparent in-house too. Over the last few years, to give one example, NatWest Markets has migrated over to Google Cloud. Along the way, the bank trained 1,100 workers in the new platform, an approach that’s ultimately led to a 60% improvement in computing times for overnight risk simulations and calculations.
Better safe or sorry?
When Marcar began his life in finance, digitalisation was only in its infancy. He describes a world where bank IT departments could run a load of processes manually – and recover promptly if something went wrong. Yet in today’s sector, and especially for a bank as invested in new technologies as NatWest, even simple problems can spiral. Consider, for example, a report from January last year, which saw millions of NatWest and other banking customers left vulnerable to hackers, all because their providers allowed them to choose online passwords which included their own
names. Other difficulties can be embarrassing in other ways. In 2017, a tech Good Samaritan realised NatWest’s customer-facing website wasn’t secure – only to be told by the bank’s Twitter account that “I’m sorry you feel this way.” Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Marcar should characterise contemporary banking as a sector filled with potential threats – both practical and reputational. It’s also unsurprising that he and his colleagues should work so hard to keep internal and external information secure, lately adopting voice-recognition security for telephone banking, among other criminal-busting enterprises. Yet as the recent challenges around biometric banking implies, deciding where to draw the line between safety and security isn’t always easy. To be fair, Marcar obviously understands this: “I’m trying to get that balance between protecting the customer versus having a relatively seamless experience.” More to the point, he argues that, hiccups aside, new technology can have the ability to gather convenience and protection into a single package. Fair enough: it’s easy to see how logging in just by using their voice could save customers time compared to having to recall the name of their first goldfish. And if any digital journey is bound to have bumps in the road, Marcar seems equally optimistic about the future power of technology at NatWest. Asked about what he’d like his legacy at the institution to be, he believes that from hybrid cloud adoption to simplifying data architecture, he and his team have vast opportunities to make “a huge difference to our customers and to our proposition.” It would hardly be the first time. ●
10 Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
NatWest
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