Claire Calmejane, director of innovation at Lloyds banking group. Image: Conor McCabe Photography
Claire Calmejane, director of innovation at Lloyds Banking Group, spoke at Inspirefest 2016 about how fintech disruption is something to be embraced, not feared.
Lloyds was not caught off guard by fintech disruption, when start-ups began popping up in various spaces and slicing off different parts of the financial services pie.
According to Claire Calmejane, Lloyds was actually ahead of the game. Claiming digital banking is a story that started at her bank seven years ago, Lloyds’ customer figures point to a digitised present, not future.
There are currently 30m customers at Lloyds Banking Group; 12m operate online, and 7m users use mobile banking. “And our mobile app has been ranked first by Forrester in Europe,” said Calmejane.
“By 2017, between 50-70pc of customer needs will be served online,” she said. “We clearly see the shift, we are quite conscious of it.”
Fintech companies are everywhere and their numbers continue to swell, but there are two particular spaces that excite Calmejane most at the moment.
“Instagram went after the digital camera, [fintech start-ups] are going after the current financial services channel, finding where they can grasp onto something,” she said.
“But there are two spaces emerging in the next year: insurtech, and AI and machine learning.”
To keep pace with this, Calmejane and her team have launched a dedicated insurtech programme in Lloyds’ ‘Start-up Bootcamp’. If you can create a ground floor, you may as well get in on it.
“Banks always want to meet customers’ needs, we’re not just watching and thinking about it,” she said, noting a programme called transformation, a £1bn investment that is Lloyds’ way of adapting to its changing customers.
When it originally went online, then mobile, Lloyds satisfied certain needs of its customers, but it had to change to keep pace.
Taking the branch and telephone service of old and putting it digital is not enough, it creates “friction”, according to Calmejane. So Lloyds decided a redesign was needed, front to back, all focused on the customer.
“For example, now we don’t say, ‘I want to get a mortgage’, ‘I want to access capital’, we say, ‘I want to buy a home’, ‘I want to set up a business’.”
Elsewhere, Calmejane discussed the diversity problem in financial services. 52pc of Lloyds’ customers are female, but management demographics are not falling down the same lines.
“For us, it’s important that our leadership reflects our customer base. Part of that is the commitment of our CEO for, by 2020, 40pc of women in senior positions.”
Inspirefest is Silicon Republic’s international event connecting sci-tech professionals passionate about the future of STEM. Book now to get half-price Super Early Bird tickets before prices go up on 15 December.
