NatWest already has about 18,000 employees across its capability centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Gurugram. It is now eyeing 3,000 engineers in India by next year to strengthen its AI and data capabilities.
British lender NatWest is likely to hire professionals in India who will be part of its fledgling small language model team which will work on some specific areas such as financial crimes and biometrics.
The bank has just hired a clutch of people to work on its language models from Meta.
It has appointed Maja Pantic as its chief AI research officer to advance its AI capabilities to meet customer needs, drive cutting-edge research and innovation across the bank and support its strategic focus on bank-wide simplification. Pantic was previously the generative AI research director at Meta.
"Their focus is actually going to be on development of small language models, really looking at doing some proprietary work that can lead us to a completely different level. And the areas that we're looking at are around financial crime and biometrics," Scott Marcar, group chief information officer, NatWest Group, said.
NatWest has about 18,000 employees in India across its capability centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Gurugram, out of a global strength of 60,000. It is on track to have about 3,000 engineers in India by the end of next year, about 25 per cent of its engineering strength, focusing on data, AI platforms, and architecture.
India is a natural fit for the bank's journey to make a language model as it already has a machine learning (ML) and data science team who are developing the underlying models for the bank.
While the number of such data engineers is about a few hundred, it is expected to grow in the coming days as AI transforms every business sector, including banking and finance.
"We have been growing this team over the last two years. There's also, within the engineering teams, the use cases that are being developed. So what Scott has been doing with applied AI and even the usage of the models within the use cases is happening actually in a federated way across the engineering teams," Ruchika Panesar, India head and chief digital and information officer, group COO-functions, added.
The India centres already work on some of the mobile development of the bank to improve customer experience, besides the development and engineering of the ATM network, which is owned by India. It also tries to improve experience in the wealth management vertical.
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