NatWest transforms digital banking with strategic cloud migration

The Business Issue

NatWest’s mission is simple but ambitious: to power real-time, personalized digital experiences that help customers make confident financial decisions. Whether it’s a timely push notification about a savings goal or a relevant offer delivered in the customer’s preferred channel, the bank’s vision is built on:

• Respect and relevance: Every engagement should honor customer preferences and permissions.
• Speed and scale: The right message, delivered in the moment that matters.
• Data-driven support: Insight guides customers toward financial well-being.

But delivering on that promise required a stronger foundation. With more than 19 million customers and 40+ engagement channels, NatWest’s customer engagement team faced growing demands. Their infrastructure, built on a private cloud, was struggling to keep up. Frequent system timeouts disrupted digital interactions, from personalized offers to core account services.

System timeouts made services unavailable to customers, which meant the bank was missing opportunities to help customers in their moments of need.

Manual platform upgrades created additional friction. Updates that should take days were stretching into 12-month projects. The team was eager to explore Pega’s latest AI-powered features but was stuck waiting for outdated systems to catch up. And most critically, the platform lacked the resilience, performance, and capacity to support the next era of digital banking.

To move forward, NatWest identified four core requirements:

1. Increase platform stability and resilience
2. Improve performance at customer touchpoints
3. Scale capacity – both technically and operationally
4. Enable and adopt new features faster

The Solution

NatWest approached their transformation with discipline and care. Rather than jumping into a full migration, they launched a four-stage journey to Pega Cloud® – prepare, move, modernize, and scale – designed to balance innovation with operational excellence.

1. Prepare: The team started by defining scope, identifying strategic business goals, and exploring migration options. A targeted pilot helped surface challenges early and build cross-functional alignment.

2. Move: The migration to Pega Cloud focused on stability, performance, and enabling new capabilities. Each of NatWest’s three business units took a tailored approach:

   • Wealth management built a new cloud-native application from scratch.
   • Commercial banking followed Pega’s remediation path to modernize existing infrastructure.
   • Retail banking used a hybrid strategy, migrating incrementally while adopting new tools like a content management system.

The bank also adopted:

• Deployment Manager, Pega’s automated code deployment tool, to eliminate manual processes.
• DevOps and test automation, increasing speed and reducing errors.
• Foundations for real-time data streaming, enabling smarter, faster customer decisioning.

The Results

The results have been transformational:

• Faster deployments: What once took days now happens “at the click of a button.”
• Accelerated upgrades: Projects that previously took 12 months can now be finished in days.
• Increased stability and resilience: Service disruptions from timeouts are no longer a daily concern.
• Better colleague experience: With Pega’s 1:1 Operations Manager, which orchestrates personalized customer actions across channels, teams now feel like they’re “working with the system” instead of fighting against it.

Lessons in transformation

NatWest’s cloud journey has already delivered measurable results, but their most valuable takeaways are strategic:

• Start with a pilot to surface risks and accelerate learning
• Secure champions across business and technology teams
• Balance diverse needs while keeping scope focused
• Embed governance and security early to scale with confidence