Lloyds Bank to sell more customer data and cut costs by 35%

Lloyds Banking Group plans to slash technology costs by hundreds of millions of pounds by 2028, and sell more anonymised customer data to third parties.

According to a Financial Times report, the bank’s chief technology officer, Vic Weigler, outlined its plans.

What is dubbed Technology Strategy 3.0 includes increasing the proportion of staff that work in IT and data roles, making hundreds of internal apps defunct and automating compliance checks in real time.

According to The Financial Times, Lloyds’ chief operating officer, Ron van Kemenade, wants the bank to be “the UK’s biggest fintech”.

A Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson said: “Under our current strategy, we are transforming our business and accelerating our in‑house data and technology capabilities so we can deliver better and more innovative digital experiences for customers. We look forward to setting out our future ambitions at our strategy day in July.”

From 2021 to 2025, the bank saved £1.5bn in technology costs, according to documents seen by The Financial Times.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly adopted by banks to reduce costs. Such is the scale of AI adoption that Lloyds Bank is training all of its 67,000 employees how to use it. The bank has launched an AI Academy, with the aim of reaching its target of all staff being AI literate by the end of 2026.

In January, the bank said that staff will be given interactive training modules, short courses, articles, podcasts and opportunities for community learning. It will kick off with every member of staff completing a module on responsible, safe and ethical AI use.

Lloyds wants its staff to be able to use AI in their everyday roles. “Scaling AI is about getting real use cases into production so we can simplify processes for colleagues and deliver more personalised services for customers,” said Ron van Kemenade, group chief operating officer at the banking group. “By investing in the skills of our people, we can do this responsibly and at pace, improving service today and building the foundations to scale new innovations in the future.”

The bank said in a statement: “The ambition is that by the end of 2026, 100% of colleagues at Lloyds Banking Group will be AI literate: confident, capable and responsible users of AI.”

It had previously announced AI training for over 200 of its most senior staff to ensure the company gets the most out of the technology. The programme, delivered by Cambridge Spark alongside experts from Cambridge University, focused on areas including identifying transformational opportunities for AI and spearheading its implementation.

Separately, last year, Lloyds Bank’s plans to cut what it deems its lowest-performing staff was revealed, with around 3,000 employees at risk, half of whom could lose their jobs.

According to the independent union for Lloyds employees, the BTU, bank bosses planned to use its internal HR data to select low performers.

The BTU said the bank’s executive team will monitor statistics in Workday to ensure a 5% job cut target is achieved.

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