NatWest Boxed simplifies embedded finance for brands
Embedded finance is becoming increasingly complex as brands want to offer financial products within their customer journeys. This requires secure, resilient, and adaptable banking infrastructure. NatWest Boxed, part of NatWest Group, is tackling this challenge with its proprietary embedded finance platform.
The platform provides technology and operational capabilities that enable major UK brands to offer financial products to customers, including The AA, Saga, and Sainsbury’s. NatWest Boxed has launched instant-access savings and unsecured lending products, as well as point-of-sale lending.
Building a Platform for Embedded Finance
Asif Siddiqui, Director of Engineering, Banking as a Service at NatWest Boxed, has led the engineering work behind the platform’s expansion. With experience working for global brands like Amazon and Emirates Airline, he applied his knowledge of high-stake, high-transaction-volume systems to the complexity of banking infrastructure.
NatWest Boxed was established around 2022 and initially worked with a major European technology provider to launch its embedded finance offering. The original model divided responsibility between the two organizations, with NatWest owning its core banking engine and the technology partner operating the embedded finance orchestration layer.
Over the next two years, the business matured from its original strategy, rebuilding its platform in-house while continuing to operate and scale products already launched with customers. This required a large-scale migration carried out while the business was already live, which Asif describes as a significant challenge.
The team came up with a phased blueprint, starting with micro-domains such as identity management, customer management, or account onboarding. They created an orchestration layer to coordinate activity between systems, allowing the business to direct requests to either the existing platform or the new in-house platform.
The migration was complicated by the regulated nature of banking, requiring the preservation of existing customer profiles and correct handling of data from new customers. To address this, NatWest Boxed built a synchronization system that kept the old and new platforms aligned, ensuring compliance and control in a highly regulated environment.
NatWest Boxed completed the migration with zero customer downtime during cutover, achieving a significant milestone in its platform development. The team’s approach reflects a wider engineering principle at NatWest Boxed: speed must be built on resilient architecture rather than pursued at its expense.
Engineering for Speed and Resilience
Asif explains that the fundamental challenge in his role is moving at relentless start-up speed while maintaining tier-one bank availability and regulatory protection. To address this, NatWest Boxed has given engineering teams ownership of specific micro-domains, each operating within strict data and API contracts.
This approach allows teams to develop their areas independently, reducing the need for coordination across multiple domains and enabling more frequent releases. The architecture is cloud-native and API-first, following continuous integration and deployment principles.
NatWest Boxed has recently achieved ISO 27001 certification, an international standard for information security management systems. Asif says the business operates according to “elite” DORA metrics, measuring software delivery performance, including deployment frequency, delivery speed, and recovery from failure.
The team‘s focus on resilience and validation mechanisms has enabled them to innovate independently, preventing changes in one area from causing unexpected failures elsewhere. Asif believes that having resiliency in the underlying platform is the foundation for innovation, allowing teams to own micro-domains and make changes independently.
NatWest Boxed’s platform is being developed to provide an end-to-end solution for enterprises, including technology, customer service, and regulatory protection. The business is preparing for a new generation of automation, with Asif saying that embedded finance has developed beyond simple payment options at checkout.
Brand partners want deeper customer engagement, offering a range of financial products to their customers. The platform must orchestrate multiple workflows, and Asif believes that it needs to be “agentic AI-ready,” enabling AI agents to interact, orchestrate, and execute smart workflows.
NatWest Boxed is already investing in agentic AI, which Asif believes will increase development velocity and productivity multifold. The business is working with financial services consultancy Capco, which has been part of NatWest Boxed’s journey since the beginning, providing experienced engineering resources and supporting the development of the platform.
As NatWest Boxed continues to develop its platform, it is focused on providing speed, flexibility, and control to its brand partners while preserving the resilience and regulatory protection associated with a major bank. The business is preparing for a future where AI-enabled banking will play a significant role, and Asif is confident that its platform will be ready to support this evolution.
NatWest Boxed’s platform is being built to provide a seamless customer experience, allowing brand partners to customize their financial products and integrate them into their existing customer journeys. The business is working closely with its partners to understand their needs and develop solutions that meet their requirements.
Asif Siddiqui notes that the company’s major priority is embedding agentic AI in its product development life cycle and seeing how it can multiply its time to delivery, which will be critical to the company’s future success.
Preparing for Future Growth
NatWest Boxed’s platform is being developed to support a new generation of automation, with a focus on agentic AI. The company believes that this technology will increase development velocity and productivity, enabling AI agents to interact, orchestrate, and execute smart workflows.
The consultancy has provided experienced engineering resources, helping the business to develop its internal teams and move at pace with its large-scale program.
