What happens when one of the UK’s largest banks puts AI at the centre of how it serves millions of customers?
In this episode of WRAP UP, I sit down with Suresh Balaji, Chief Marketing Officer of Lloyds Banking Group, to discuss how Lloyds is approaching AI, agentic systems, customer trust and the future of banking.
Lloyds serves around 28 million customers, with 23 million interacting with the group digitally and billions of app logins every year. Now, the bank is testing an AI assistant designed to help customers discover financial products, receive proactive support and better manage their financial lives.
We discuss:
• Why Lloyds already has its consumer AI assistant in beta • Where AI could first appear inside the Lloyds banking app • Why fraud prevention could become one of banking’s most valuable AI use cases • How Lloyds built Cortex and its Envoy “agent factory” • Why Lloyds believes AI needs governance, testing and lifecycle management • How one internal AI agent reduced an eight-week process to around 30 minutes • What Lloyds learned when it tested humans vs AI vs humans working with AI • Why Suresh believes it should be “humans in the lead,” rather than simply humans in the loop • How AI is changing financial-services discovery and marketing • Why trust could become an even bigger competitive advantage in AI-powered banking • Whether legacy banks can use their data and scale to compete with digital challengers • The role AI could play in Britain’s wider economic competitiveness
Suresh also explains Lloyds’ three-part framework for transformation: tasks, tools and talent, and why giving employees access to AI may matter just as much as choosing the underlying models.
A conversation about what AI looks like when it moves beyond experimentation and starts being deployed across one of Britain’s biggest banking groups.
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