An In Good Company podcast with Lee McNabb, Head of Group Payment Strategy, Partnerships and Innovation at NatWest.
Leadership, innovation and risk: a conversation with NatWest’s Lee McNabb
Is it possible to be both highly innovative and risk aware? How can leaders instigate a culture of innovation at industry or organisational level? How does the world of fintech navigate the challenges of testing and successfully implementing new ideas alongside managing potential and unforeseen risks. And what happens when you throw in the idea of commercial success, large scale role out and usability and end customer satisfaction?
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Lee McNabb joins Dan to talk about empowering innovation while managing risk, and how one of the UK’s largest banks is navigating this exact challenge. Lee and Dan’s conversation covers:
- How innovation and risk coexist in financial services
- The commercial realities of rolling out new tech
- The future of AI in banking
- The importance of customer satisfaction in shaping innovation.
This episode is for you if you're in fintech, leadership, or are just curious about how big banks stay ahead in a fast-evolving world.
Can fintech organisations be innovative and manage risk?
I think the simple answer is they have to. Innovation needs to be free from initial constraints like governance, otherwise, you'll never truly innovate. And let's be candid, innovation can be used to alleviate risk. NatWest is a huge organisation with 20M+ customers across consumers and corporates, and a real challenge is fraud. But as a bank and as an industry, we have used innovation and product capability development to try and combat fraud. We’re using that very real risk to drive innovation to try and mitigate that.
Collaboration, AI and the future
Gone are the days of building everything in-house. You need to collaborate at industry level because the nature of payments is that it's a network business. If you don't have that network, you don't really have a commercial model. Collaborations enable NatWest to modernise infrastructure, scale innovation, and maintain trust. [At time of recording] NatWest were the only UK bank to have announced a partnership with OpenAI. That's about going deeper into AI and what our strategy is for AI, how can we use it in everything that we're doing. While the opportunities are vast, there are huge risks, particularly around fraud and deepfakes. The key is to stay ahead of the curve while maintaining ethical responsibility and customer trust.
“Everyone should be empowered to innovate - no matter where they work or what they do.”
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