Lloyds looks to move customer accounts to newly acquired platform

Lloyds Bank is aiming to save £750 million annually on tech spending as it eyes a move to a new core banking platform.

The Financial Times has reported that the new entity will be based on startup Thought Machine, which Lloyds paid £11 million for a 10 per cent stake in November, following a year of testing of its cloud-based Vault product.

At the time the bank announced that it would enter into a development and deployment phase in 2019.

Citing an internal memo seen by the newspaper, the FT says the bank has been in discussion with regulators about moving a first tranche of 500,000 customer across from the defunct Intelligent Finance arm to the new platform. If successful, the bank plans to shift more of its business in a phased process over the next few years.

According to the report, Lloyds plans to use the new platform to catch up with digital-native challengers, acknowledging that incremental improvements to its legacy infrastructure can only take it so far.

A reduction in costs is also expected, with Thought Machine claiming that the bank will reap an estimated 35-40 per cent in savings by moving across to Vault. For a bank that spends about £2.2 billion per year to keep the lights on across its business, that represents a £750 million per annum saving.


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