Automation investments paid off so well for the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2020 that the U.K. bank plans to invest in additional automation, targeting gross savings of $423.1 million by 2023.

Royal Bank of Scotland is owned by the $1.1 trillion NatWest Group. Group CEO Alison Rose said automation and digitalization drove revenue and growth while reducing costs, during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings Feb. 19. If achieved, the $423.1 million savings would be part of the bank’s cost reduction target of around 4% per annum, Rose said.

Artificial intelligence played a key role in automating customer interactions: digital assistant Cora, launched in 2018, is part of the bank’s mobile messaging service.

“Use of our artificial intelligence chatbot, Cora, grew 67% in 2020 to 9 million interactions, of which 40% were completed without any human intervention,” Rose said. “Customer journeys currently account for 30% of our cost base, so transforming them through greater automation will have a significant impact on our operating costs.” Other digitalization efforts have also seen an increase in volume; one example is video banking, which increased to around 15,000 interactions per week in January 2021, up from 100 a week in January 2020, Rose said.

One automation use case highlighted on the earnings call was for the Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS) process. BBLS is the U.K. equivalent of the Paycheck Protection Program in the U.S. The bank created an end-to-end digital application process and fully automated platform within the space of a week to receive a high volume of applications. The platform enabled the approval of $12.1 billion in loans for small- and medium-sized businesses in 2020.

“We also used automation to improve account opening in commercial banking last year, resulting in a Net Promoter score of 60, up from 16, and we are building on this experience to continue to transform other customer journeys,” Rose said. Net Promoter is software used to gauge customer engagement. “For example, since last September, our customers have been able to renew their mortgage online in a simple straight-through process that takes as little as 10 minutes compared with anywhere up to 23 days, when the process was manual.”

The mortgage automation has led to an improvement in mortgage retention levels to about 80% in 2020, compared with about 70% in 2019, Rose said. Decisioning time for commercial lending also improved, shifting from 14 days to 48 hours for BBLS lending, and 10 days for other lending.

Shares of NatWest Group [NWG] were trading at $184.78 as of market close, down .55% from market open.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.