Awards for Excellence 2020
|
|
As the biggest retail bank in a country where cash usage is lower than other big European states and where cloud-based neobanks have particular traction, Lloyds Banking Group faces an unusual digital banking challenge.
It is confronting this challenge head on, demonstrating a greater understanding than its closest regional peers of the need for fundamental transformation for the digital era.
This understanding was evident in the previous awards period in the bank’s creation of a new group transformation division under Zak Mian and in its strategic partnership with UK fintech Thought Machine, a specialist in cloud-based core banking software. It announced a commitment to invest £3 billion in technological transformation.
Lloyds seems very aware of the need to make its IT infrastructure more flexible and scalable. Investment in private cloud technology has already helped it migrate around 600 applications to the cloud.
|
|
|
Zak Mian |
The digital transformation push continued early in 2020 when Lloyds announced a new five-year partnership with Google Cloud.
At the same time, Lloyds announced a separate partnership with Microsoft to support its workplace transformation and operational resilience.
The product of several years of preparation and supplemented by the bank’s use of Microsoft’s cloud product Azure, Lloyds says its rollout of Microsoft Managed Desktop across its business makes it the world’s largest financial services company to deploy this technology.
Lloyds became the first UK lender to launch open-banking capabilities for credit cards and savings accounts. It expanded its Single Customer View service, allowing customers to see their bank, pension and insurance account details in one place – more than five million customers were using this service by the end of 2019.
Other developments over the year included a new feature in its mobile app allowing customers to instantly share confirmation of payment to friends or family through WhatsApp, SMS or email.
The bank also rolled out voice identification in its telephone banking service, as well as location-tracking for transactions using Google Maps.
