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UNITED KINGDOM | |
Charlie Nunn, who has been chief executive of the UK’s best bank since 2021, announced a new strategy for Lloyds Banking Group in the first quarter of 2022. It didn’t receive much attention as it was announced on the same day that Russia invaded Ukraine. And the new strategy is really the old strategy with a slight shift in the focus beyond cost discipline and scale efficiencies towards investing in growth and doing more for the bank’s market leading 26 million customers.
Lloyds has done well for years with its multi-brand approach, serving different customer demographics through the Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows channels run off a single IT platform. It has set out to build on its leadership in mortgages, provide more insurance products and unsecured loans to consumers, build a mass-affluent offering, extend coverage of small and medium-sized enterprises, and do more with large corporates.
So far, so good. The group grew revenue in 2022 by 14% with a 4% increase in other revenue beyond the net interest income on which it traditionally depends. Lloyds remains the UK’s largest digital bank and, by continuing to invest in personalization and digitalization, saw a 15% increase in daily log-ons in 2022 while growing its digitally active users by 8% to 19.8 million.