Lloyds Banking Group has embarked on a significant digital transformation with the launch of Athena, its first large-scale generative AI tool designed to enhance customer service efficiency. Athena functions as an advanced knowledge hub, enabling customer service staff to swiftly navigate through some 13,000 internal information articles. This innovation has resulted in a dramatic reduction in average search times—from 59 seconds to just 20 seconds—cutting customer wait times by two-thirds and saving substantial employee time.
The tool has already been adopted by around 21,000 Lloyds staff, generating over 2.1 million searches since its early 2024 launch. The bank plans to expand Athena’s reach to other customer-facing teams, aiming for 40 million searches by the end of 2025 and extending availability to approximately 43,000 colleagues by 2026. Athena supports a wide range of customer interactions, including personal banking, fraud and disputes, and bereavement support. Its generative AI capabilities summarise detailed procedural articles, allowing staff to retrieve and comprehend complex information in half the usual time, thereby enabling them to focus more on resolving intricate customer issues.
This AI deployment is a cornerstone of Lloyds’ broader digital innovation strategy, which includes a substantial recruitment of 1,500 technology and data specialists and exploration of around 50 AI use cases spanning customer support, chatbots, and fraud detection. Rohit Dhawan, Lloyds’ recently appointed group director of AI and advanced analytics and a former Amazon Web Services executive, is tasked with leading this AI integration across the bank’s operations. The strategic partnership with Google Cloud underpins much of this transformation, leveraging Google’s Vertex AI platform. This collaboration has enabled Lloyds to empower over 300 data scientists and AI developers, accelerating the deployment of impactful AI solutions that enhance personalised financial services and customer experience.
Lloyds’ digital ambitions extend beyond AI-powered customer service. The bank has also launched a pioneering blockchain trial in partnership with Aberdeen Investments and the FCA-regulated digital asset exchange Archax. This pilot uses tokenised real-world assets as collateral for foreign exchange (FX) trades, a first in the UK market. Tokenised units of Aberdeen’s money market fund and UK government gilts were employed in these trades, facilitated through Archax’s infrastructure on the Hedera Hashgraph blockchain. The trial demonstrates the viability of regulated digital assets as collateral in one of the world’s largest and most active FX markets, potentially revolutionising operational efficiency, automating compliance processes, enhancing collateral usage, and reducing counterparty risks.
This strategic embrace of blockchain technology reflects Lloyds’ commitment to innovation in financial services infrastructure, with executives describing it as a significant milestone for the UK’s financial system. Industry leaders from Aberdeen, Lloyds, and Archax have emphasised the potential of blockchain to streamline processes and unlock new trading opportunities, marking a key evolution in digital finance.
Complementing these developments, Cavendish Online, a Lloyds subsidiary, has partnered with fintech Aveni.ai to integrate generative AI in its protection insurance business, enhancing the quality of advice and service provided during customer calls. This initiative uses AI to analyse interactions rapidly, helping identify customer vulnerabilities and improve adviser performance, showcasing Lloyds’ wider commitment to embedding AI-driven innovations across its services.
Together, these initiatives position Lloyds Banking Group at the forefront of the AI and blockchain revolutions in banking, aligning with its mission to deliver outstanding service and operational excellence. The bank anticipates that AI-driven innovation will contribute at least £50 million in revenue growth and productivity gains in 2025, underscoring the transformational impact of these technologies on its business and customer experience.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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