NatWest chief executive Paul Thwaites said artificial intelligence (AI) would transform the bank’s workforce, but declined to say whether it would be scaled back, Finestra reported on Friday (19 June).
Speaking at a business summit hosted by the Times, Thwaites reportedly said: [will be] Powered by AI. ”
The Daily Mail also reported Mr Thwaites’ comments, adding that NatWest is hiring more people for roles related to software and AI.
According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Financial Services Advances in the Enterprise AI Race,” 85% of financial services and insurance companies 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 companies are revenue recognition and accounting, credit risk assessment and scoring, and sales forecasting and pipeline optimization. According to the report, the percentage of companies using AI for these tasks was measured at 65%, 60%, and 60%, respectively.
“The industry’s most adopted use cases center around structured and auditable back-office functions, the internal operations that keep the business running but are not directly visible to customers,” the report said.
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On June 2, PYMNTS reported in Nvidia’s “State of AI in Financial Services: 2026 Trends” that nearly 90% of financial institutions have implemented or are evaluating AI, and 65% are already using it.
On Thursday (June 18), Dennis Lu, Deutsche Bank’s chief information officer for investment banking, was reported to have said that with the use of AI, the bank could reduce the completion time of some operations from two years to as little as three months.
Lu said in the report that Deutsche Bank uses simpler models for routine operations and is cautious about introducing AI into everything, and is currently developing AI tools to automate the extraction and analysis of financial data and link external events to the bank’s portfolio to measure exposure.
JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said in May that the bank may eventually hire more AI experts than bankers.
“I think we’re going to have fewer jobs in the future,” Dimon said. “There will be all kinds of jobs. I think in certain categories we will hire more AI people and fewer bankers, so they will be even more productive.”
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