Western Europe's best digital bank 2020: Lloyds Banking Group

As the biggest retail bank in a country where cash usage is lower than other big European states and where cloud-based neobanks have particular traction, Lloyds Banking Group faces an unusual digital banking challenge. 

It is confronting this challenge head on, demonstrating a greater understanding than its closest regional peers of the need for fundamental transformation for the digital era.

This understanding was evident in the previous awards period in the bank’s creation of a new group transformation division under Zak Mian and in its strategic partnership with UK fintech Thought Machine, a specialist in cloud-based core banking software. It announced a commitment to invest £3 billion in technological transformation.

Lloyds seems very aware of the need to make its IT infrastructure more flexible and scalable. Investment in private cloud technology has already helped it migrate around 600 applications to the cloud. 

The digital transformation push continued early in 2020 when Lloyds announced a new five-year partnership with Google Cloud. 

At the same time, Lloyds announced a separate partnership with Microsoft to support its workplace transformation and operational resilience.