Lloyds Bank says 'digitization' will power branch closures

"That's starting to have a positive impact from an efficiency perspective and on cost to serve and cost to acquire retail customers,"

"Our strategic initiatives have generated £1.5 billion of gross cost savings so far as a result of the strategy, and we continue to see further opportunities to reduce manual back-office processes from a finance perspective,"

"From a retail perspective, you continue to see kind of branch closures and using digitization to improve the cost to serve and also improve the customer journeys as well... also in terms of building things into the app,"

"What we are also doing, linked to our mass affluent proposition, is work with the [UK regulator] Financial Conduct Authority in a sandbox environment to look at AI-driven money management tools and whether there's more that we can do in that space, particularly linked to investments as well as savings products. It's definitely an area that we're very much focused on,"

Lloyds Banking Group invested £3 billion over three years and £4 billion over five years in transformation, allocating a large portion to technology and cyber security. Those investments have generated £1.5 billion of gross cost savings and enable further reductions in manual back-office finance processes. The bank plans hundreds of branch closures in 2025 and 2026 while continuing to operate more than 1,000 branches. Digitization is being used to reduce cost-to-serve, improve customer journeys and build features into the mobile app. The bank is piloting AI-driven money management and wealth tools with the Financial Conduct Authority in a sandbox for mass-affluent customers. Some customers remain not digitally active, sustaining the need for physical branches.

Read at Theregister