Big interview
their working rhythms. It requires, for instance, close interaction between IT and other areas of the c-suite. It requires the careful balancing of customer comfort and customer safety. And it requires, at its most ambitious, the throughgoing transformation of NatWest’s business model – one where ‘banking as a service’ (BaaS) rules supreme. It goes without saying that none of this is easy. Get it right, however, and NatWest’s second birth could yet be as successful as its first.
Teching control
Speak to Marcar for long and it becomes apparent that he’s deeply conscious of the challenges – and opportunities – of contemporary banking. He describes today’s sector as one where banks are obliged to keep up with the technical torrent around them, shifts that have transformed everything from how people understand data to how they chat to friends. “I think we’ve moved from an era of invention in the early 1990s, to one of applied innovation in the 2020s,” is how Marcar puts it. “All the technology we need to run financial services has already been invented, or can be reused from other industries, whether it’s gaming, or social media, or big tech – which simply wasn’t the case 30 years ago.” Examine Marcar’s career and his eagerness to take the long view makes sense. Starting at JP Morgan in 1994, he’s thought about integrating finance and technology for almost 30 years. Along the way, he’s delved into everything from emerging markets to debt, finally rising to become CIO at Deutsche Bank in July 2020. Hopping from one industry star to another two years later – he joined NatWest in September 2022 – Marcar is now bringing all this experience to bear on his new role. There’s clearly much to be getting on with. Arguing that he wants his new employer to boast a “sustainable world class” technical setup, Marcar suggests it’s an aspiration that could prove helpful everywhere from data management to the “lifecycle of the consumer experience.” Certainly, there are plenty of internal reasons that
NatWest might want to foment a digital revolution. Marcar, for his part, highlights a desire to modernise legacy mainframes and data centres – something 56% of respondents in one recent PwC report claimed could lead to poor data quality and integrity. Other statistics equally speak to the institutional benefits of embracing new technology. According to 2022 work by McKinsey, for instance, banks that adopt the cloud could potentially deliver the same output with 30% less manpower. More than that, however, you get the sense that Marcar is ultimately intent on pleasing his customers, hardly surprising when over 90% of Brits now use digital banking. That’s doubly true, perhaps, given some of the challenges NatWest’s technical systems have faced over recent times. To be sure, it’s hardly the only bank to struggle in this regard. But that presumably didn’t mean much to the thousands unable
Future Banking /
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to access their online accounts last March, or the many frustrated at failing to get biometric approval for purchases – despite staring at their smartphones for minutes at a time.
Peddle to the Mettle
From soaring prices to an imminent 6% rise in the main rate of corporate tax, running a business in modern Britain can be exhausting. For some NatWest customers, however, there might be a glimmer of hope in the form of Vodeno. Based in Warsaw, this bijou fintech has teamed up with NatWest to offer a range of financial services products to corporate clients in the UK. Encompassing everything from point-of-sale credit through deposits and payments, Vodeno’s offering was developed through Mettle: NatWest’s small business banking app, a platform that’s recorded 500% customer growth since the start of 2021. And if Marcar sees his employer’s new relationship
with Vodeno as a “long-term partnership” – the deal is already worth £120m – it’s far from the only place that NatWest is experimenting with BaaS. In 2021, for instance, NatWest acquired Rooster Money, a free app that allows parents to give their kids pocket money for doing their chores. This February, meanwhile, the City titan announced plans to buy an 85% stake in workplace savings account provider Cushon, a deal worth £144 million. Yet for all their variety, these are far from scattershot acquisitions. As Marcar puts it: “We think that embedded finance generally is going to be pretty critical in the ecosystem, and providing banking as a service capability will become increasingly more utilised.”
All this is only possible, Marcar continues, if there’s “tight integration” between his technical teams and NatWest’s broader business, something he emphasises must be true everywhere from coder’s office to customer pocket. “We are typically designing the systems together, the workloads together, the customer journeys together, how we think about how customers
Above: Filled with greenery, NatWest’s London office was revamped in 2021.
Opposite page: Scott Marcar, CIO of NatWest.
500% Natwest 30% McKinsey 9
The percentage growth in customers using Mettle, NatWest’s small business banking app, since the start of 2021.
The percentage of current employees needed to deliver same output on a cloud-based banking system.
NatWest
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