In a move to advance its strategic transformation, Lloyds Banking Group is leveraging the artificial intelligence (AI) and data science capabilities of Google Cloud.
By partnering with Google Cloud, Lloyds is aiming to transform customer and colleague experience and unlock opportunities to innovate, enhancing its ability to provide personalised financial services.
As part of its mission to ‘Help Britain Prosper‘, Lloyds Banking Group is using data and AI to help its customers make better financial decisions. The Group is also building a new machine learning (ML) and generative AI platform using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. This collaboration is enhancing Lloyds’ ability to deploy impactful AI use cases at pace with over 300 data scientists and AI developers across the Group now using the platform.
In moving to the new platform, Lloyds Banking Group migrated 15 modelling systems, comprising hundreds of individual models from the Group’s on-premise infrastructure. As a result, the Group says it has saved 27 Co2 tonnes of operational emissions.
The migration has also unlocked new capabilities and tooling across the Group’s business areas, enabling it to develop ML and AI capability further and deploy advanced AI models. This includes an algorithm which reduces the income verification step in its customers’ mortgage applications from days to seconds.
Ranil Boteju, group chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds Banking Group, said: “Moving to Vertex AI has been transformative for us as a Group, providing us with the scalability and reliability to innovate with AI at pace. Vertex AI is enabling data scientists and AI developers across the Group to access generative AI solutions with consistent guardrails, as well as giving them the flexibility to use Large Language Models from third parties and open-source providers, as well as Google’s Gemini model.”
AI driving personalisation
With the increasing speed at which AI is evolving, Lloyds Banking Group recognised the need for a platform capable of keeping up with these advancements. It sought a flexible solution that could integrate a variety of tools, including open-source models.
“With Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, Lloyds Banking Group can deploy powerful machine learning models faster, so that it can action transaction insights more quickly,” explained Tara Brady, president of Google Cloud EMEA. “This partnership demonstrates how cloud-powered AI innovation can drive unique, personalised experiences, bringing the bank even closer to its customers.”
Since deploying the new platform on Vertex AI, Lloyds Banking Group has successfully initiated over 80 new ML use cases and launched over 18 generative AI systems into production, spanning its entire business. A further 12 generative AI systems are expected to go live by the end of June.
Work is also ongoing on a new agentic AI system, which hopes to transform how customers interact with the Bank. The prototype was built in collaboration with Google Cloud and is expected to launch to customers later this year.
