NatWest
NatWest
SME International Payments Pilot
National Westminster Bank, commonly known as NatWest, is a large retail and commercial bank in the United Kingdom.
Introduction
In April 2016, while attending the Innovate Finance Global Summit in London, Hamish Anderson, CEO of Money Mover, was set a challenge by one of the world’s most highly regarded strategy consultancies. Could Money Mover make its innovative international payments proposition for SMEs fit for purpose for one of the UK’s major banks?
In what became a competitive pitch to NatWest the answer was a resounding ‘yes’.
The challenge
As with most big banks, NatWest’s larger commercial and institutional customers are well catered for, having access to a variety of banking platforms for international payments, including Bankline, FX Micropay and Agile FX. However, NatWest wanted to improve the experience for SMEs and offer them a customer-focused, seamless, easy to use international payments system offering exceptional transparency, functionality and reporting.
The solution
By July 2016, a plan was in place and, working with the NatWest Innovation Team, a pilot programme was established to offer NatWest’s London and South East’s SME customers a new user interface for international payments. For the purposes of the prototype, Money Mover was tasked to create a ‘white labelled’ service, powered by Money Mover but under the auspices of NatWest. While the aim of the pilot was to obtain feedback from its customers on the radically different user interface and process flow provided by Money Mover, NatWest, understandably, was not prepared to compromise on its high standards of security, compliance, reliability, speed and service.
Conclusion
The NatWest Relationship Managers reflected that taking the pilot to their customers not only gave them something exciting to talk about but underlined the bank’s commitment to innovate.
For Money Mover, selection for the pilot confirmed that its carefully crafted UI and UX were class-leading. It also demonstrated it could operate at the level required to work strategically with one of the world’s largest banks to become a trusted and secure provider.