Join us as an Engagement and Partnerships Manager
- In this crucial role, you’ll lead innovative initiatives across the bank by collaboratively identifying potential opportunities and strategic partnerships that drive purposeful outcomes
- We’ll look to you to build and strengthen relationships both within and outside the bank to identify and progress the most strategically impactful innovation opportunities
- This is a great opportunity to expand your leadership profile as you collaborate with the internal and external stakeholders to identify and understand key focus areas for exploration
As an Engagement and Partnerships Manager in Open Innovation, you'll help identify, explore, and validate opportunities that create value for customers and the bank. Working at the intersection of emerging technology, customer needs, and business strategy, you'll bring external insights, innovative thinking, and strong partnerships to shape the bank's future.
You'll also work closely with start-ups, technology providers, academic institutions, and other ecosystem partners to source new capabilities and opportunities. Internally, you'll build strong stakeholder relationships, secure sponsorship for innovation initiatives, and help take ideas from discovery and experimentation through to implementation and scale.
In addition, you’ll be:
- Identifying and developing innovation opportunities aligned to strategic priorities and emerging technology trends
- Building and managing relationships across the external innovation ecosystem to source ideas, capabilities, and partnerships
- Bringing market and technology insights to inform strategy, decision-making, and investment priorities
- Collaborating with stakeholders across the bank to build support, manage delivery, and maximise impact
- Representing innovation initiatives through governance forums, while ensuring alignment with relevant risk and policy requirements
We're looking for someone with a strong understanding of the external innovation landscape and its impact on customers, with the ability to translate emerging technologies, market trends, and ecosystem developments into meaningful opportunities for the business. You should also have a good grasp of financial services strategy and be excited by the opportunity to explore, test, and scale technology-enabled propositions.
To succeed in this role, you must be comfortable collaboratively incubating ideas, identifying high-potential opportunities, and shaping innovation pathways informed by developments both within financial services and across adjacent sectors.
In addition, you’ll need:
- The ability to build productive relationships and collaborate effectively with internal and external stakeholders, while managing commercial discussions and partnership negotiations where required
- Proven experience in shaping and delivering innovation initiatives, with the ability to adapt to new insights, navigate ambiguity, and progress opportunities through structured innovation pathways
- Strong strategic thinking skills, with the ability to define experimentation and validation approaches, take concepts from discovery to implementation, and make informed investment recommendations
- Experience building and managing relationships with a broad range of external partners, including start-ups, scale-ups, academic institutions, technology providers, and industry networks
- A strong understanding of emerging technology trends and their implications for financial services, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, agentic AI, automation, data, and digital platforms
- Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to engage senior stakeholders, build alignment, and secure support for new opportunities
Hours
35Job Posting Closing Date:
24/08/2026Ways of Working:HybridSkills Required
- Strong understanding of the external innovation landscape and ability to translate emerging technologies into business opportunities.
- Good grasp of financial services strategy and implications for technology-enabled propositions.
- Proven experience shaping and delivering innovation initiatives and progressing opportunities through structured innovation pathways.
- Ability to build and manage relationships with start-ups, scale-ups, academic institutions, technology providers, and industry networks.
- Experience managing commercial discussions and partnership negotiations.
- Strong strategic thinking with experience defining experimentation and validation approaches and making investment recommendations.
- Strong understanding of emerging technology trends, particularly artificial intelligence, agentic AI, automation, data, and digital platforms.
- Excellent communication and influencing skills with ability to engage senior stakeholders and secure support.
NatWest Group Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about NatWest Group and has not been reviewed or approved by NatWest Group.
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Flexible Benefits — A flexible ValueAccount structure with pension and benefit funding allows tailoring of health, protection, lifestyle, and savings options, with unused amounts typically paid as cash. This flexibility supports personalisation of coverage, particularly in Great Britain where the framework is most detailed.
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Retirement Support — Employer-funded pension contributions are provided on top of salary in Great Britain, alongside automatic retirement enrollment and share/save programs. This creates structured long‑term wealth support as part of total reward.
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Parental & Family Support — UK policies outline extended maternity, adoption and equal partner leave on full pay with a phased return, plus paid neonatal care leave. These provisions are positioned as market‑leading and complement broader flexibility resources.
NatWest Group Insights
What We Do
We’re a business that understands when our customers and people succeed, our communities succeed, and our economy thrives. As part of our purpose, we’re looking at how we can drive change for our communities in enterprise, learning and climate. As one of the leading supporters of UK business, we’re prioritising enterprise as a force of change. We’re focusing on the people and communities who have traditionally faced the highest barriers to entry and figuring out ways to remove these. Learning is also key to our continued growth as a company in an ever changing and increasingly digital world. By setting a dynamic and leading learning culture, our people prosper, and our customers are given the tools to continue to improve their financial capability and confidence. One of the biggest challenges we all face in our future is climate change. That’s why we’ve put it right at the core of our purpose. We want to champion climate solutions with financing and entrepreneurial support, fully embed climate into our culture and decision making, and be climate positive by 2025. We’re committed to using our purpose to break down barriers, drive change and ultimately create a great place to work.
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