.png)
1 month ago
2
Lloyds Banking Group — the £18.67 billion turnover UK-based bank — has promised that it will continue to use “digitization” to power a program of branch closures.
On a call to investors, the UK household name said it had invested £3 billion over three years, and £4 billion over five years, in transformation, a large chunk of which has gone on technology and cyber security.
That's starting to have a positive impact from an efficiency perspective and on cost to serve and cost to acquire retail customers," claimed Sarah Robson, senior manager, investor relations, Lloyds Banking Group.
"Our strategic initiatives have generated £1.5 billion of gross cost savings so far as a result of the strategy, and we continue to see further opportunities to reduce manual back-office processes from a finance perspective," she said.
"From a retail perspective, you continue to see kind of branch closures and using digitization to improve the cost to serve and also improve the customer journeys as well… also in terms of building things into the app," she said.
Robson said the bank — which has revealed that hundreds of branch closures are due to take place in 2025 and 2026 — plans to experiment with AI-powered wealth management tools for its richer customers.
"What we are also doing, linked to our mass affluent proposition, is work with the [UK regulator] Financial Conduct Authority in a sandbox environment to look at AI-driven money management tools and whether there's more that we can do in that space, particularly linked to investments as well as savings products. It's definitely an area that we're very much focused on," she said.
However, Robson admitted that some customers are not digitally active, and the bank continues to operate more than 1,000 branches in the UK, the largest number among high-street banks.
"But increasingly, customers are becoming more and more digitally active," she said.
Lloyds Banking Group revealed in January that it planned to close 136 branches by March 2026.
Consumer group Which? said banks and building societies in the UK have closed 6,561 branches since January 2015, "at a rate of around 53 each month." That equates to 66 percent fewer physical outlets.
"NatWest Group, which comprises NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank, has closed 1,505 branches - the most of any banking group. Lloyds Banking Group, made up of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, has shut down 1,423 sites."
- FOMO? Brit banking biz rolls out AI tools, talks up security
- NatWest banks on AWS and Accenture for AI-driven customer overhaul
- Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages
- Tim Hortons offers free coffee and donut to settle data privacy invasion claims
Earlier this month, Michelle Conway, lead data and AI scientist at Lloyds, promised a secure environment for customer data as it develops AI tools. "It's like Fort Knox locked down," she claimed.
Lloyds Banking Group – which looks after the cash of customers across Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax – said the integration of AI into financial services was not just about adopting new technology but about "reimagining the entire banking experience."
In February, Lloyds launched a review of the technology and engineering professionals working in the UK operation, with headcount reductions inevitable and some roles being offshored to Lloyds Technology Center in India. ®
