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Lloyds Banking Group will sell more customer data and automate governance checks in a bid to slash technology costs and reinvent itself as “the UK’s biggest fintech”.
The high street lender, which has 28mn customers, is aiming to cut IT costs by hundreds of millions of pounds a year by 2028 as it shutters hundreds of internal apps, according to internal documents.
The overhaul — outlined in a 2025 dossier compiled by the group’s chief technology officer, Vic Weigler — also includes having a greater proportion of its workforce in tech and data roles.
Dubbed “Technology Strategy 3.0”, the overhaul aims to reduce costs by 35 per cent this year, compared with its 2021 technology spend. From 2021 to 2025 the bank delivered £1.5bn in technology savings, according to documents presented to investors.
Lloyds also plans to commercialise more of its data by anonymising and selling customer information to third-party businesses. The bank already does this but plans to expand its operations, according to the documents seen by the FT.
That would allow Lloyds to move “beyond the boundaries of banking by developing technical services as products, creating the opportunity for new potential revenue streams”.
Data use is a thorny issue for the bank. Lloyds analysed anonymous data from thousands of staff’s accounts to inform pay discussions with unions, the FT previously reported.
The strategy document also calls for “removing manual controls, governance and increasing automation of controls by design”.
These changes will see more of Lloyds’ compliance checks done by machines in real time rather than retrospectively verified by an employee, according to one person familiar with the strategy. They added that there would still be some human oversight of the process.
Lloyds’ chief operating officer, Ron van Kemenade, wants the bank to be “the UK’s biggest fintech” as a result of the shake-up, according to slides summarising the plans.
Traditional banks have spent heavily on overhauling their technology to ward off the threat from fintechs and digital banks such as Revolut and Monzo. But much of their infrastructure remains a patchwork of legacy systems that find it difficult to communicate with each other.
London-headquartered Revolut, which is Europe’s most valuable fintech and has 70mn customers worldwide, was valued at $75bn in September. Lloyds has a market capitalisation of £58.1bn ($77.6bn).
The 2028 plan will also involve Lloyds managing more of its technology services in-house.
Savings will come from reduced maintenance costs for technology, according to one person familiar with the bank. Savings will be reinvested into boosting the overall productivity of its IT, the person added.
The bank intends to scrap 862 internal apps and push ahead with plans to close 15 data centres. These store customer data and will instead be replaced by more cloud software.
The move comes as chief executive Charlie Nunn prepares to outline his new five-year strategy for Lloyds. This will include a push to lend more to big corporate clients and expand its services to financial institutions, the FT previously reported.
The current five-year plan, set out in 2022, included modernising the bank’s technology, and Nunn has overseen heavy investment in updating infrastructure.
However, an internal review revealed shortcomings in the current technology strategy, according to another document seen by the FT and which was also compiled last year by Weigler. He commissioned an extensive review that interviewed 50 employees and drafted in management consultants from the firms Accenture, EY and Gartner.
The review’s findings said that parts of Lloyds’ guidance for staff were overly verbose, difficult to navigate and unclear, according to a copy seen by the FT. It found other problems, such as constant organisational change and patchy training of staff on how to use new technology.
Lloyds declined to comment on what it said were leaked documents. One person close to the company disputed that the report identified shortcomings and said that these were normal issues associated with implementing a new technology across thousands of employees. They added most employees welcomed the technological changes implemented.
The bank said in a statement: “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.”
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