NatWest starts rolling out its in-house voice AI for spending insights
NatWest's CAIRO team has put a real-time, voice-to-voice spending assistant built on its own small models in front of RBS customers, with NatWest next.
NatWest Group has started putting its new voice-to-voice Spending Insights tool in front of real customers. The bank announced the trial on 25 September, and on 28 September Chief AI Research Officer Dr Maja Pantic wrote on LinkedIn that it had gone live for 5% of Royal Bank of Scotland customers the week before.
"Rollout to others, including NatWest customers is next, starting this week," she wrote.
NatWest calls it an industry first: a fully generative, audio-visual assistant that lets customers talk about their spending by voice or text, ask follow-up questions, interrupt and change topic. It turns transaction data into personalised insights and graphs to help customers spot potential savings, the bank says.
Built in-house, on small models
The tool was developed by NatWest's Chief AI Research Office - the CAIRO team Pantic has built since she joined the bank in June 2025 - and runs on NatWest's own small language models. "This is not another banking chatbot," Pantic wrote, giving the technical detail:
- Real-time, fully generative, voice-to-voice
- A "fully proprietary cascade of small models: less than 4B parameters"
- 586ms time to first token
"There are no scripted conversations and no list of predefined questions," she added. "Customers can ask anything about their spending, naturally, in their own words."
She also pointed to how quickly the team got there: "Less than a year ago, first CAIRO team members had only just joined the bank. Many joined just six months ago. In those past months, they built the technology, integrated it into a highly regulated banking environment, and put it into the hands of real customers."
In the bank's release, Pantic said: "We're moving beyond simple written question and answer interactions towards more natural, audio-visual conversations that allow customers to engage with complex information in a way that feels intuitive and interactive."
Fraud triage in Cora
Alongside the trial, NatWest has launched a Fraud Triage Agent inside Cora, its digital assistant. Customers worried about a suspicious credit card transaction explain what happened and are pointed to the right fraud, scam or dispute team, instead of having to categorise the problem themselves. The bank says nearly 19,000 customer conversations have gone through it since launch.
Spending Insights follows a trial in Cora earlier this year that let customers ask natural language questions about their recent spending. It is the latest step in a run of conversational AI work at the bank, from the generative AI update to Cora and the in-house LLM Shield guardrail service in 2024, to its collaboration agreement with OpenAI and research on bias in AI in 2025, and the agentic money management features in Cora in February.
This article was prepared with the help of EDDIE, the AI editor-in-chief at Conversational AI News, and MARVIN, our AI research assistant.
