The Celent Model Bank Innovation Frontier award recognises the financial institution’s commitment to innovation and willingness to invest and experiment with leading- and even bleeding-edge technologies. NatWest demonstrated such commitment to innovation in 2020 with two separate initiatives: Quantum-Computing-as-a-Service (QCaaS) and Payit.
This is Part II of the award-winning case study, which profiles NatWest’s Payit initiative. NatWest’s QCaaS initiative is described in Part I, NatWest: Getting Ready for Quantum Computing.
NatWest Payit is an innovative account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments solution that leverages the Open Banking infrastructure in the UK. It allows consumers to pay merchants by authorising payments directly from a bank account rather than by card. While it remains to be seen how widely the solution becomes adopted by merchants and consumers, there are potentially attractive benefits for all parties. For NatWest, it is a valuable opportunity to engage with clients in a different context and be at the forefront of developing innovative Open Banking solutions.
