LLOYDS BANK: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION With more than £9billion in government-backed lending, 33,000 capital repayment holidays and 20,000 fee-free overdrafts arranged during the first few months of the pandemic, the UK’s biggest bank by customer numbers kept calm and carried on. Under the hood at Lloyds Bank, an innovation policy best described as ‘relentless incrementalism’ – an approach to digital transformation designed to avoid the cardiac arrest inflicted on organisations by ‘big bang’ migrations – was proving its mettle, particularly when it came to business banking. Around £2.4billion of a £3billion digital transformation plan had been spent by then on technology innovation and changes to working practices across the organisation since 2018. “A lot of that technology investment has gone into things like robotics, including around the loan process, where we’ve improved the time of getting approval to customers. So, with the government’s COVID-19 Bounce Back Loans, for example, the majority of customers received their funds within 24 hours,” says Andrea Melville, managing director of
commercialisation and propositions in Lloyds Bank’s Global Transaction Banking Team. Now, as UK businesses face the long, painful haul back to a hoped-for recovery, she is conscious that the sum of all the parts that the bank has been incrementally improving over the past two and a half years, must add up to so much more if it’s to help businesses whether this storm. According to the most recent Lloyds Bank UK Recovery Tracker, which has taken the pulse of the stuttering economy over the summer, 13 of the 14 sectors it monitors saw stronger growth than their global sector equivalents in August. The caveat is that they were almost all hit harder than their international peers, so they have further and faster to go. Melville, who is responsible for a number of strategic initiatives across the transaction banking product suite, covering application programming interfaces (APIs), data, and blockchain, believes the bank’s APIs, many developed with client input in the Lloyds Bank lab, will be critical in helping that recovery. “Lloyds Bank has a really strong cultural curiosity, which results in lots of proof of concepts, lots of pilots, lots of research, and lots of listening. We focus on trying to
understand clients’ needs and clients’ wants. We’re constantly trying to reduce friction, and openly evaluating whether or not we would look to buy, build, or partner to deliver what we need,” says Melville. That’s resulted in a cascade of API-supported business tools being developed over the past year, including a payables API using the UK’s Faster Payments rail, which has now handled £1billion in transactions; a new asset finance API for brokers; and a trade tracker API that provides visibility of deals in the supply chain, all of which can help in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. “What we’re seeing is trends that were already there in the market before the pandemic are definitely accelerating on the back of it,” says Melville. “There is a lot we could do to help chief finance officers and chief information officers around leveraging APIs – getting automated key treasury activities, such as balance sheets, statement retrievals, sweeping, FX hedging – bringing all that together. “On the data side, it’s about bringing it all to a single spot – it could be banking data and accounting data – which will create a much more holistic view to help with working capital.
the recovery Andrea Melville, MD of Commercialisation and Propositions in Lloyds Bank’s Global Transaction Banking Team, believes adopting an API-first approach and working ever closer with fintechs will help build a path out of the crisis for business www.money2020.com/moneyfest
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