NatWest Group PLC (NWG) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to NatWest Group's Q1 2026 results management presentation. Today's presentation will be hosted by CEO Paul Thwaite and CFO Katie Murray. After the presentation, we will take questions. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. As usual, I'm here with Katie. I'll start with a brief introduction before Katie takes you through the numbers and we'll then open it up for questions. We started the year with strong momentum across our three businesses and made good progress against each of our three strategic priorities. First, we continue to pursue disciplined growth. In retail banking, we increased our share of the mortgage market as we expand our offering and announce new partnerships, such as becoming the exclusive mortgage provider for Rightmove. In private banking and wealth management, our acquisition of Evelyn Partners makes a strong addition to the group. The transaction is progressing well and we expect it to complete in the second quarter, subject to the usual regulatory approval. In commercial and institutional, we are the leading bank for UK startups and we grew our share this quarter as we onboarded 24,000 new startups, a 25% uplift on the same period last year, supported by easier, agentic onboarding. Second, we are leveraging our investments in simplification and have delivered over £100 million of additional cost savings in the first quarter. We employ over 12,000 software engineers, and we are complementing that talent with artificial intelligence. So over 40% of our code is now written by AI, and we are scaling agentic software development. Typically, our development process for new customer propositions requires 12 engineers and takes six weeks. but in some scenarios with a team of three engineers and seven agents, we can ...