“We’ve made significant strides in transforming our business for the future,” reveals Atkinson. “I’m really proud of what the team have achieved with technology but there’s loads more to go after. It’s a really exciting time as we become a modern, progressive, tech-enabled business. We’ve aimed to maintain pace and an agile mindset. We want to get products and services out to our customers and colleagues and then test and learn to see if what we’re doing is actually making a meaningful difference.”
The organisational growth agenda for technology
Lloyds Banking Group maintains an organisational missive around helping Britain prosper, which means building trusted relationships over customer lifetimes by re-imagining what a bank provides. The technology and business strategies are one and the same: Business & IT = Product (with IT shaping the business future). To achieve that goal, Atkinson explains there are three core tenets for his team (mobile first, customer-centric and personalisation) underpinned by technology and data.
“We are aiming to be the UK’s biggest mobile digital bank,” states Atkinson. “It’s the primary channel for interaction orchestration, but we also augment that with humans at the key moments of truth. We want to reimagine our physical channels around distribution with advice centres or digital face-to-face.”
Change Management
Modernisation is among the core pillars of Lloyds Banking Group’s technology strategy, along with simplification, resilience and data security. There’s always an urge from technologists, and business people, to engage with and showcase the latest new technology. “I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt and drank the Kool-Aid,” laughs Atkinson. “We have matured as an organisation to the extent we’re not looking at new tech for its own sake as a hammer trying to find the next nail to hit. We want to be a firm that uses technologies to solve real world problems.”
