NatWest Group elevates the banking experience for customers

NatWest Group sought to become the top UK bank for customer service by delivering new offerings quickly, while cutting costs and meeting regulatory requirements. The organization automated change processes so employees can deliver better banking experiences, while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Using technology to create a service edge

More than 20 million customers around the world rely on NatWest Group to provide them with financial products and services they trust. With a focus on transforming customer experiences by 2020, NatWest hopes to become the top bank in the United Kingdom for customer service, trust, and advocacy. Technology will play a leading role in the bank’s journey by giving employees the tools they need to do business with colleagues, customers, and regulators as efficiently as possible.

Reducing IT service management complexity

As a result of growth through acquisition, the bank’s 14,000 users utilized 13 different IT service management (ITSM) tools and multiple configuration management databases (CMDBs). This resulted in NatWest spending too much administrative time on change management. Raising a change took an employee an average of seven hours using five or more different tools.

The manual approval processes then caused further delays. Regulatory compliance was a challenge as well — with 56 controls monitored by regulators, the risk of service failures can be high.

Helping lead the change to simpler IT

The business needed a single integrated toolset to automate the delivery and control of incident, problem, change, and configuration management. NatWest chose the ServiceNow IT Service Management solution to unify IT planning, delivery, and operations, and partnered with ServiceNow Professional Services to assist with the implementation.

“ServiceNow appealed to us because it is cloud-based and easy to use,” says a spokesperson, NatWest Group. “ServiceNow gave us a sandbox environment to experiment with for six months before we actually signed the deal, so we were confident that the solution would meet our needs.”

Becoming more responsive

Success came quickly: within 10 months, the bank had integrated ServiceNow with 15 data sources and delivered the solution to all 14,000 users. The average time to raise a change and incident improved by 76% and 60% respectively.

By automating more than 50% of the controls associated with critical IT processes, NatWest saved the equivalent of 46,000 employee hours, as well as realizing savings by decommissioning 10 legacy systems.

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