NatWest Is OpenAI’s Third Major Banking Partner, Follows UK Bank Layoffs and Bank Closures

• NatWest and OpenAI have signed a landmark partnership.
• Planned closures and layoffs have plagued NatWest since 2024.
• Global industries are increasingly turning to AI to boost efficiency.

British banking group NatWest has announced it will become the first U.K. bank to partner with OpenAI.

This partnership follows the U.K.-based bank’s announcement of widespread layoffs and branch closures as the financial sector continues shifting toward greater reliance on artificial intelligence.

NatWest Partners With OpenAI

The collaboration between NatWest and OpenAI, announced on Thursday, March 20, will build on the bank’s current AI virtual assistants: Cora+ and AskArchie+.

Launched in 2024, Cora+ is a generative AI upgrade to the company’s long-standing virtual assistant. The upgrade provided customers with a smoother and more human-like conversational experience.

With the new OpenAI partnership, NatWest hopes to push Cora+ further “to help meet more consumer banking needs,” the bank said in a press release .

“The wide-ranging, large-scale collaboration has the potential to accelerate how quickly and widely NatWest can deploy some of the latest and most powerful developments in generative AI,” it wrote.

NatWest Group Chief Information Officer Scott Marcar said the partnership will provide colleagues with “even more sophisticated tools to assist them” when dealing with customers and fraud prevention.

“AI is already playing a vital role in our digital transformation, helping colleagues across the bank to serve customers in a more personalized and productive way,” Marcar said.

“We now have the potential to accelerate this even further by accessing OpenAI’s newest technologies and expertise,” he added.

NatWest Closures and Layoffs

The banking AI partnership follows a number of NatWest store closures and layoffs.

In 2024, NatWest announced it was closing its business in Poland , which would result in the loss of 1,600 bank staff members.

The bank said it was consolidating its financial crime operations into two hubs in India and Britain.

According to a bank spokesperson, 45% of the jobs would be eliminated, while the remaining 55% would be transferred to the other two countries.

A total of 53 NatWest branches will close across the U.K. before June 2025, according to TimeOut .

AI Partnerships and Job Displacement

OpenAI has established significant partnerships with three major banks: NatWest, BNY, and BBVA. These partnerships highlight the finance industry’s growing reliance on AI systems.

In February 2025, America’s oldest bank, BNY, entered into a multi-year agreement with OpenAI to integrate advanced AI tools into its internal platform, Eliza.

Global bank BBVA made headlines in November 2024 when it widely integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise across its organization. The bank said it leveraged OpenAI’s GenAI to boost efficiency and streamline processes.

Beyond finance, the rapid rise of AI has led to a flurry of workforce reductions across multiple industries.

In January 2025, the World Economic Forum surveyed 1,000 global employers and found that 41% of company leaders believe they must reduce their workforce over the next five years.

The company leaders, employing more than 14.1 million workers across 22 industries, predicted that a large group of workers would become obsolete due to AI.

In 2024, over 150,000 tech employees were laid off across more than 525 companies, according to layoffs.fyi , as Big Tech firms realign their workforce strategies.