Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - NatWest: Personalizing banking at scale with machine learning on AWS (FSI203)

Summary

NatWest Group, a major UK bank, faced challenges in delivering machine learning (ML) workloads quickly and dealing with siloed data.
They transformed their ML delivery using AWS SageMaker, improving speed and governance of data access.
Over 500 data scientists and engineers were hired to expand analytics and data science capabilities.
NatWest's strategy focused on personalization to improve customer financial well-being, resulting in a significant increase in customer engagement.
The bank's ML operations vision addressed challenges in people, process, data, and technology, leading to the standardization of patterns and simplification of data access.
AWS SageMaker ecosystem was central to their ML operations, providing a shared service account, development, test, and production accounts, and a federated operating model.
The bank achieved a reduction in time to create ML environments from 50 days to less than a day.
NatWest built a feature store and scaled up their data lake, moving it to AWS.
They are exploring data sharing with non-competitive banks through a banking insights platform on AWS.
The bank anticipates running thousands of ML models, fully governed and controlled, to radically transform their operations.

NatWest's journey highlights the importance of ML in personalizing customer experiences at scale in the banking industry.
The transition to AWS SageMaker demonstrates the platform's suitability for large, complex, and regulated industries like banking.
The bank's focus on personalization and customer well-being as a strategy for engagement and growth is a shift from traditional sales-driven approaches.
NatWest's ML operations vision and the use of AWS services underscore the need for standardization, simplification, and modernization in ML deployment.
The bank's efforts to democratize ML across various departments, including legal and risk, indicate a broad organizational commitment to data-driven decision-making.
NatWest's initiative to build a banking insights platform for sharing data with other banks suggests a collaborative approach to innovation in the financial sector.
The case study of NatWest at AWS re:Invent 2022 serves as a blueprint for other financial institutions looking to leverage cloud services for ML and data analytics.