NATWEST BOXED
The financial product may be supplied by a regulated bank, but the customer relationship remains closely connected with the partner brand.
The AA, Saga and Sainsbury’ s each bring different customer expectations, commercial models and brand identities, meaning NatWest Boxed needs to provide common financial infrastructure while giving each partner the flexibility to tailor their own customer experience.
“ We’ re providing an end-to-end solution for these enterprises,” Asif says.“ These obviously include our technology stack, but then we also have multipleaward-winning customer service as well as NatWest regulatory protection. By providing this, we offload the heavy lifting required for any organisation to offer financial services to their customers.”
Preparing for AI-enabled banking NatWest Boxed’ s platform is being developed within NatWest Group – this gives the business access to established additional expertise in regulated financial services while its engineering model aims to provide the speed associated with a technology-led start-up.
Brand partners can access savings and lending capabilities without building a regulated bank or developing the operational infrastructure needed to support customers.
Asif says end-to-end ownership makes those integrations easier to manage. Teams can design common capabilities while allowing partners to configure how financial products appear within their own experiences.
He says:“ For us to build a platform that is future ready, it was important for us to have that full end-to-end ownership.”
The platform is also being prepared for a new generation of automation. Asif says embedded finance has developed beyond simple payment options at checkout.
“ Brand partners want deeper customer engagement— they want to offer a range of financial products to their customers.”
That could include savings, unsecured lending and point-of-sale finance, as well as products designed around specific customer segments or loyalty schemes. And, as products become more varied, the
16 nwboxed. com