London, March 5, 2026, 09:29 GMT
- Royal Bank of Scotland, owned by NatWest, plans to expand its Accelerator programme to support 5,000 entrepreneurs in Scotland this year
- Bank commits £1 million over three years to the Scottish EDGE Awards, including a £200,000 Scale EDGE prize
- NatWest continued its share buyback, purchasing 458,962 shares on March 4
NatWest Group’s Royal Bank of Scotland is expanding its Accelerator programme to support 5,000 entrepreneurs in Scotland this year, stepping up support ahead of a new Edinburgh hub due to open later in 2026. The bank is also putting 1 million pounds into the Scottish EDGE Awards over the next three years, including a 200,000-pound Scale EDGE prize. “In our tenth anniversary year, we are going to turbocharge our support for Scotland’s entrepreneurs,” Darren Pirie, head of accelerator and partnerships at Royal Bank of Scotland, said. 1
The push matters because UK banks are trying to win and hold on to smaller firms without leaning only on price for loans. Early contact with founders can turn into longer relationships — accounts, payments, and eventually credit — even if it takes time to show up in earnings.
For NatWest, Scotland is a core patch for the Royal Bank brand and a place where it still has scale and a dense business base. The accelerator pitch is simple: give practical help now, and be the first call later when a company grows up and needs money and advice.
Royal Bank said its accelerator provides coaching, networks and access to expertise across the bank “at no cost”, and that its app has logged more than 1,500 downloads in Scotland since launching in March 2025. It said its Glasgow and Edinburgh hubs support 1,000 businesses and that community firms have created over 900 jobs; Scottish EDGE winners have created more than 4,400 jobs since 2014 and almost 800 million pounds in turnover. Scottish EDGE chief executive Evelyn McDonald called the new 1 million-pound commitment “a significant vote of confidence”, with the finals for the current round due on June 11 in Edinburgh. 2
NatWest also said it bought back 458,962 shares on March 4 through UBS, paying between 584.0 pence and 597.8 pence. The trades were executed under instructions the lender issued to UBS on Feb. 16, it said, including purchases on the London Stock Exchange and alternative venues. It plans to cancel the shares; after settlement it will hold 217,719,076 shares in treasury and have 7,973,404,761 shares in issue, excluding treasury shares. 3
A share buyback is a company’s purchase of its own shares, often used to return cash and reduce the number of shares dividing profits. Treasury shares are stock a company holds itself and typically do not carry dividends or votes.
NatWest in February reported a 24% jump in 2025 pretax profit to 7.7 billion pounds and raised its return-on-tangible-equity target to more than 18% in 2028. It also announced a 750 million-pound share buyback for the first half of 2026. 4
The bank has also agreed to buy wealth manager Evelyn Partners for 2.7 billion pounds, including debt, to expand in a crowded market for fee-based wealth services. Reuters reported NatWest is following rivals such as HSBC and Lloyds in boosting wealth offerings, and that the Evelyn auction drew interest from Barclays and Royal Bank of Canada. RBC Capital Markets analyst Benjamin Toms wrote that the deal, while a bolt-on, could be “transformational” by filling a gap in NatWest’s affluent wealth offering. 5
Still, the Scotland push is hard to score on a spreadsheet: free advice and workspace do not guarantee a customer for life, or a borrower worth backing. NatWest is also balancing buybacks with the risk that a weaker economy or a messy integration of Evelyn could squeeze capital and profits at the wrong time.
