As one of the largest global banks, NatWest continually finds ways to better serve its extensive customer base by offering more personalized, responsive, and intelligent products and services. Its ongoing collaboration with the University of Edinburgh applies the latest innovations in AI and data research to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and behaviors.
For its new Healthy Habits research study, NatWest is working with the University of Edinburgh and Instabase to explore how they might help customers make better financial decisions and improve their financial well-being. The study is part of the Centre for Purpose-Driven Innovation in Banking, which is a two-year strategic partnership between NatWest and the University of Edinburgh. Using Instabase’s AI platform, NatWest and the University of Edinburgh will combine participant health data with financial data to find valuable insights into how people’s health habits and their financial well-being are interconnected.
Efficiently Analyzing Health and Financial Data With AI
Healthy Habits aims to identify correlations between health habits and financial well-being and uncover patterns that could help individuals make better financial decisions. The project brings together experts from various fields, such as data analytics, human-centered design, and statistics, and includes Dr. Mike Allerhand, a statistician and programmer from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Mathematics.
To discover useful insights, the team needed to combine and analyze multiple datasets, including health data from wearable fitness trackers and smartphones and financial data from bank accounts. All data collected and processed was done so with the explicit consent of the research participants, and participation was voluntary. By leveraging Instabase and Dr. Allerhand’s expertise in data analysis and modeling, NatWest and the University of Edinburgh can identify patterns and correlations between health and financial data.
A huge challenge in this project was accessing large amounts of unstructured data in various formats and from a variety of sources. This was critical, as that data needed to be fed into statistical models to inform their research. The project team found an efficient and simple solution with Instabase, the leading generative AI platform for extracting, processing, and analyzing unstructured data.
The team used Instabase to automatically extract and validate transaction data from participants’ bank statements (with explicit consent). Then, they combined that with health data from wearable fitness trackers and smartphones to create a comprehensive dataset for analysis.
“Instabase is a great solution that has allowed us to get massive amounts of unstructured third-party bank statement data into a workable and usable format. The platform has been easy for various team members to use, with very little training. Using Instabase meant that we were able to cast our recruitment net wide, to find as many interested research participants as possible, regardless of who they bank with. I’m really excited to see the outcome of this project, which will inform future research and potential new banking products and features,” said Julia Skar, Product Manager for Healthy Habits.
Unlocking this crucial data has enabled NatWest and the University of Edinburgh to employ various statistical modeling techniques, such as structural equation modeling (SEM) and composite-based models, that will help them test the relationships between healthy physical and financial habits.
James Holt, Head of Automation and Intelligent Document Processing at NatWest, is excited about all the possibilities this creates. “I am extremely proud to be part of such an important and valuable initiative with one of our technology partners Instabase and the University of Edinburgh. I very much look forward to seeing the insights this provides us” said Holt.
The Impact of Healthy Habits and AI
Healthy Habits has the potential to inform future NatWest financial products and services, giving the team the data they need to suggest customer-facing insights that could improve customers’ financial outcomes. The project is also poised to contribute to the growing body of research on the intersection of health and finance.
Instabase is proud to be a strategic partner of NatWest in their collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. By harnessing the power of AI and unstructured data through Instabase and employing advanced statistical modeling techniques, the project team can revolutionize the way customers experience banking and empower NatWest to continue leading the way in customer service and financial services innovation.
