NatWest is putting a capital-markets technologist at the centre of its data and AI ambitions. The group has appointed Triona O’Keeffe as Chief Data and Analytics Officer, a role she will take up in January 2027 with a mandate to make data and AI more accessible to the bank’s engineering teams.

The hire lands as banks race to move generative and agentic AI from pilots into production. O’Keeffe’s brief spans the plumbing that engineers rely on and the customer-facing tools that sit on top of it — a signal that the bank sees data infrastructure and AI delivery as one job, not two.

A capital-markets CV moves into retail banking

O’Keeffe brings roughly a decade of senior data leadership from two heavyweight institutions, giving NatWest a hire steeped in the infrastructure that underpins large-scale financial technology.

She spent five years as Chief Information Officer for Data and Analytics at the London Stock Exchange Group, and before that served for more than three years as CIO for Shared Application Services at Deutsche Bank. That grounding in capital-markets infrastructure and banking platforms could shape how NatWest structures its own data operations. O’Keeffe has described the timing as pivotal, framing the move as a chance to help unlock the full value of data, AI and engineering for customers, and pointing to the group’s customer focus, its role in the UK economy and the pace of its transformation as what drew her in.

Cora and the shift to agentic AI

The most visible part of the remit is Cora, the assistant NatWest customers already lean on — and a system now being pushed well beyond its chatbot roots.

Launched in 2017 as a text-based service, Cora has since grown into a generative AI digital assistant, and O’Keeffe will oversee its transition to agentic capabilities. The tool already handles more than 12.9 million retail conversations a year, with future priorities including money-management support and more tailored customer interactions. Behind the scenes, NatWest is also scaling generative and agentic AI for internal use, aiming those tools at workloads such as fraud prevention and complaints handling — consistent with a long-running push to modernise banking through technology, data and AI without eroding customer trust.

Ethics guardrails around the rollout

Adoption may dominate the headlines, but NatWest is treating responsible deployment as a parallel priority rather than an afterthought.

In June 2026 the bank launched an AI and Data Ethics accreditation for staff, built around e-learning modules on its AI Ethics Principles plus a half-day practical session on managing ethical risk in day-to-day AI use. Dr Paul Dongha, the bank’s Head of Responsible AI and AI Strategy, has argued that as AI becomes more embedded in how the bank serves customers and runs itself, colleagues need the skills and confidence to use it responsibly — and that the accreditation gives them practical tools to spot risks, ask sharper questions and make better calls in their roles. As large financial institutions integrate generative AI at speed, that kind of workforce training could become a sector norm rather than a differentiator.

As AI works its way deeper into everyday banking, the harder task shifts from adopting it to using it responsibly. — On pairing AI expansion with risk management

By wiring ethics into daily operations alongside the technology itself, NatWest is trying to keep its expansion aligned with its risk appetite — the kind of balance O’Keeffe will now help hold as data and AI move further to the core of the bank.