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KAREN JOY BACUDO
Finance Editor
NatWest has partnered with Adclear to embed the company’s AI agents into its marketing approval workflow, cutting approval times for marketing content by 80%.
The system has been integrated into NatWest’s Workfront workflow as part of a broader effort to centralise marketing operations across product lines including current accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgages and savings.
The move replaces a patchwork of manual sign-off processes and older tools that had built up over time across different parts of the business. As marketing teams were brought onto a single workflow system, those separate review processes became harder to manage and risked slowing content production.
Adclear’s software reviews website, social media, marketing and advertising content, flagging potential issues in copy, creative or disclosures before publication. The setup gives NatWest a single review process across channels and product areas, with one audit trail for sign-off.
For large financial institutions, marketing compliance has become more pressing as content volumes rise and regulators increase scrutiny of financial promotions. Firms often rely on manual reviews by compliance teams, which can delay campaign launches by several days.
NatWest serves about 20 million customers across retail, commercial and private banking in the UK. Centralising approvals is intended to remove duplication and reduce the burden on compliance teams as more content flows through fewer review functions.
The deal is Adclear’s latest customer win in financial services and adds one of the UK’s largest banking brands to its client list. Its users also include Monzo, Lloyds Banking Group, PensionBee, IG Group, Freetrade, Yonder, Trade Nation, ActivTrades, Ocean Finance, Flagstone and Blockchain.com.
Workflow shift
Historically, NatWest’s product divisions used their own tools and review methods for marketing materials. That fragmented structure became harder to sustain as the bank moved towards a more centralised operating model for content and communications.
Embedding Adclear into Workfront means staff involved in sign-off no longer need separate tools for different channels or products. Instead, the review process sits within the existing workflow used by marketing teams.
The change reflects a wider push by financial firms to adapt compliance operations to higher publishing volumes, particularly as AI tools make it easier to generate more content. In that environment, banks are under pressure to speed up approvals while maintaining controls over regulated promotions.
“Adclear has helped us turn compliance from something that slowed marketing down into something that actively supports how fast we can move. Cutting our approval times by 80% has let our teams focus on producing better, more relevant content rather than waiting on sign-off, and that speed is now a genuine advantage in how quickly we can get campaigns to customers. This is exactly the kind of technology-led transformation we want running across the bank,” Matthew Harwood, Head of Marketing and Engagement at NatWest, said.
Sector demand
Adclear focuses on compliance checks for regulated financial services marketing. Its software reviews financial promotions against rules including those set by the Financial Conduct Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and works inside tools already used by marketing teams such as Figma, Canva, Slack, Google Docs and Google Drive.
The company argues that compliance processes in financial marketing have not kept pace with growth in content output. That gap has created demand for systems that can automate parts of the review process and provide a documented approval trail for compliance teams.
Doni Hoti, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Adclear, said: “Financial promotions compliance hasn’t kept pace with how much content marketing teams now produce – output across the sector has grown roughly tenfold over the past decade, while most firms are still running the same manual, email-based approval chains they always have. The rules were never the bottleneck, the process around them was. NatWest recognised that early, and this partnership is what happens when a bank decides to fix the process itself rather than manage around it.”