Lloyds Banking Group wants to make all brands within its portfolio “experience-led”, taking its learnings on AI, marketing and social media to the wider group.

CMO Suresh Balaji explains that using Lloyds as the “masterbrand”, he intends to apply lessons from the bank’s brand work to sister companies, such as pensions and insurance provider Scottish Widows. This builds on the vision set out in 2024 to make Lloyds an “experience-led brand”.

Across all the brands, Balaji explains the priority is to ensure “experiences match the marketing”. The team are working to codify the various brands through a design system, named Cancara after Lloyds’ black horse mascot. The system holds all design elements, the idea being to codify them across “every journey possible”. The intention is for customers to “feel the brand in every swipe”.

“With 25-plus million customers, you want to ensure the brand shows up in every touchpoint,” he explains.

“It’s going to be really hard for us to do, because we have thousands of journeys, millions of customers going through them, ending ever so fast. We need to get our data transformation in the right place.”

Every campaign from Lloyds will always be social first. And social also offers us an opportunity to test a lot of things.

Suresh Balaji, Lloyds

In mid-January, Lloyds unveiled a new brand platform focused on giving consumers confidence the bank could help “turn their aspirations into reality”. The ‘Bank on Lloyds’ platform was positioned as a “bold creative reset”, promising “consistency across the customer journey”.

With the campaign still in its early stages effectiveness is yet to be determined, but “lead indicators” show current account searches for Lloyds are at their highest for five years.

The bank is also “ahead of plan” on the number of customer “needs met” – a term it uses instead of sales. Balaji explains Lloyds “doesn’t want to sell products to customers”, but instead wants to “meet their needs”.

Lloyds is also looking to ramp up its “share of voice”, which is why Balaji and the team chose to activate in January and February – a time he says “not many organisations” campaign.

“We’ve got to start the year big. With 21 million customers on our digital app, with 1 million business, if we don’t get people excited about their aspirations in the beginning of the year, who else will?” the CMO asks.

Internally, he says the campaign has brought “excitement” to colleagues and proved a source of “inspiration and confidence for the brand”.

Building trust

As part of the new brand campaign, three television adverts are set to go live on 19 February, featuring a yet to be revealed A-list celebrity voiceover. Balaji explains it’s a voice that “instils trust”.

The issue of trust featured heavily at last week’s (5 February) LEAD conference run by the Advertising Association, IPA and ISBA. At the event, Balaji said Lloyds wants to put trust at the “heart” of its narrative as it looks to be a category leader in a digital world.

“In every category, there’s a category leader in the digital world,” he told the audience. “For me, I chat on WhatsApp. I meet on Teams, I shop on Amazon, I order on Deliveroo and I bank on Lloyds. It’s the category claim that I wanted to take.”

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He describes Lloyds as “the most trusted digital banking group in Britain”, meaning the team have a “duty of care to tell that story” to customers.

“The bigger question is not whether customers trust advertising or not. The bigger question is what is happening generally in the world, around the world, when it comes to trusting institutions, trust in establishment, trust in government, trust in everything. What’s the role Lloyds can play to help customers feel reassured that we are here?” he adds.

The group plans to further instil trust by showing customers its brands are there for them at different stages of their lives, with Balaji calling Lloyds “a supporting cast to customers’ lives”.

The fact Lloyds is “now the number one direct lender for first-time buyers”, for example, will become an increasing focus in upcoming work.

Taking learnings

The release of the Bank on Lloyds platform follows ‘The Power To Do It All’ repositioning launched in autumn 2024.

According to Balaji, the 2024 campaign kicked off a “new way” of thinking about the brand’s “visual language”, instigating a move to using two-word headlines in the creative, such as ‘horse power’ or ‘game changer’.

The previous brand platform saw Lloyds “testing” the use of a new “vibrant green” brand colour. The Power To Do It All also emphasised the need to “double down” on distinctive brand assets, such as the green palette and black horse logo.

“Cancara [the horse] appeared in all our adverts and the colour green is even more vibrant, and the two-word headlines are quite arresting and catchy. That has held us in good stead in terms of breaking through the clutter,” says Balaji.

We have thousands of journeys, millions of customers going through them, ending ever so fast. We need to get our data transformation in the right place.

Suresh Balaji, Lloyds

The Power To Do It All also marked the bank’s first social-first campaign. After seeing how this performed, Balaji says the bank will “continue to be social heavy”. The Bank on Lloyds push follows the same approach of being on social first then TV. 

“Every campaign from Lloyds will always be social first. And social also offers us an opportunity to test a lot of things,” says Balaji.

He credits the banks work with influencers for allowing greater insight into what works with consumers. The influencers Lloyds works with have to go through a “triple filtration process” to select those who align with the bank’s values.

“Some of these influencers are really clever and they can actually tell you whether the platform will scale or not, because they have experimented with so many things. Influencers have also helped us a lot in terms of working out the tone and manner of the campaign, calibrating the campaign for the audiences,” the Lloyds CMO adds.

AI future

In its annual results for 2025 released at the end of last month, Lloyds Banking Group said generative AI delivered £50m of value, with the firm predicting it will create more than £100m in additional value this year.

In 2026, Lloyds will “accelerate” AI adoption, including more AI and agentic AI use cases, and the launch of an AI Academy for 67,000 colleagues across the organisation.

There will also be the full customer rollout of Lloyds’ AI-powered financial assistant giving quicker, tailored answers to customers, focused on helping customers with borrowing, savings, investment and protection.

Balaji has been vocal about the “AI transformation” at Lloyds, particularly within marketing. The company has also created an AI blog documenting ‘Project Turing’ in partnership with Ogilvy One.

During the project the impact of AI was assessed on end-to-end marketing campaign development, as three ring-fenced teams tackled a real product launch brief. These included a team with no AI access, one augmented by Open AI and one only using AI.

The challenge was to “win back customers travel spend” by launching a travel proposition to high income professionals.

Some of these influencers are really clever and they can actually tell you whether the platform will scale or not, because they have experimented.

Suresh Balaji, Lloyds

AI was found to “significantly” amplify human creativity, excel at rapid data collection, and boost project momentum, leading Lloyds to the conclusion the future of marketing lies in “human–AI collaboration”.

The team found, for example, that while AI excelled at “surfacing observations”, it struggled to connect them to underlying human needs, although this gap will “likely close quickly”. AI alone also “fell short of making the crucial leap” from information to compelling idea, lacking the craft and execution needed “at a creative level”.

Moving forward, Balaji says training the team internally central to the bank’s AI journey. Over the last six months, there have been two “AI weeks” offering training, with Lloyds also rolling out Microsoft Copilot to more than 40,000 employees.

He explains the AI rollout spans “a triangle with three Ts” – task, talent and toolkits. The Lloyds CMO claims this approach has led to innovations, such as the bank’s insights AI platform, which is “helping democratise data and customer insights”.

Through the tool, colleagues can ask the AI brand metric related questions, such as what was the brand consideration for Scottish Widows over the past few weeks?

“We are going to democratise the data through natural language interface, so the tasks can be done faster, sooner,” says Balaji.

In the future, he wants to share the training, learnings and tools with other organisations in line with Lloyds’ motto of “helping Britain prosper”.

Just two months into a busy year for the bank – amid AI developments, the new platform, imminent TV ads and forthcoming campaigns – Balaji explains he feels like a “kid in a candy store”.