Lloyds Banking Group takes 10 per cent stake in fintech firm and enters strategic partnership to drive digital push

In conjunction with the partnership, Lloyds has made an £11 million investment in Thought Machine, representing a 10 per cent stake, as part of its ‘Series A’ £18 million investment round.

Lloyds said the UK-based growth stage technology company whose core product, Vault, is a cloud-native next generation banking platform, has been developing innovative banking technology with the potential to bring significant improvements to the Group’s customers.

The lender has been working with the fintech since last year and stressed that the partnership is in line with Lloyds’ Strategic Review, announced earlier this year, and is “consistent with its ongoing drive to enhance the customer experience, become more agile, and build on its market-leading efficiency”.

The Thought Machine team has written Vault using the latest software engineering techniques to help simplify the technical and operational complexity of banking, whilst maintaining the advantages of security and reliability and Lloyds says it has already completed extensive testing and proofs of concept through the partnership and there are plan to further develop the capabilities of Vault.

The lender says the new technology can provide customers with more tailored products, as well as enable faster development cycles and further digital banking improvements. Lloyds will enter into a development and deployment phase in 2019.

Lloyds said will continue to look at further investment opportunities to help accelerate the delivery of the ambitious transformation programme.

Zak Mian, group director, transformation at Lloyds Banking Group, said: “A key part of our recently launched three-year strategic plan is applying technology innovation to meet our customers’ evolving needs. I’m really excited to work with the Thought Machine team to explore ways to simplify and enhance our IT architecture and helping on our journey to make banking easy and simple for customers.”

Paul Taylor, CEO and Founder of Thought Machine, said: “We are delighted to announce this partnership with Lloyds. Lloyds has shown a deep commitment to embrace the opportunities that new technologies can bring in improving customers’ banking experience and it is a pleasure to take this partnership forward.”