Lloyds bank buys into cloud-native payments

Lloyds Banking Group is working with a payments financial technology (fintech) firm to investigate cloud payments infrastructure as it continues to modernise its IT infrastructure as part of its digital transformation.

As part of this, the banking giant has also taken a stake in payments technology provider Form3.

This is part of a £300m project, itself a part of The future of Lloyd’s programme, which focuses on accelerating the development of products and services to meet customer demands, such as simpler access to services as well as lower costs.

Form3 was founded in 2016 and provides a payments as a service (PaaS) to banks in the UK and across Europe.

Payments are a core part of a bank’s business and an area where customer services can be improved. Lower cost and faster payments will help banks keep pace with digital-native challenger banks.

“The strategic partnership will enable Lloyds to investigate and develop a cloud-native PaaS platform, which has the potential to significantly improve [our] payment processes, making them more efficient,” said a statement from the bank.

Lloyds Banking Group’s director of payments technical services, Otto Benz, said simplifying payments architecture while enhancing security and performance are critical to the bank’s digitisation strategy.

“The potential of the cloud in payments is enormous and is firmly at the forefront of our strategy,” he added. “We are committed to working with the most innovative technology providers, including Form3, to deliver a range of solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible while reducing risk and providing customers with an improved digital experience.”

Lloyds Banking Group’s digital transformation has recently been accelerated through deals with Microsoft and Google to give them access to the latest digital tech.

Lloyds will continue to look at further investment opportunities to help accelerate the delivery of its ambitious transformation programme. This year, Lloyds Banking Group has announced deals with Google Cloud and Microsoft, including the development of Microsoft Managed Desktop, as part of its commitment to transform for success in a digital world.

It signed a five-year collaboration deal with Google Cloud in a bid to drive forward software engineering and boost its digital transformation strategy.

Over the course of the five-year agreement, Lloyds will have the opportunity to deploy a number of Google Cloud services, including Anthos to modernise app development, Apigee to manage the bank’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to support open banking initiatives, and others to improve the customer experience and enhance cloud security.

In January, it announced a deal with Microsoft to transform the IT tools its staff use. It is rolling out productivity tools and increasing security through Office 365 through Microsoft’s Managed Desktop (MMD) service

The bank is also moving thousands of customers from its Intelligent Finance division to a cloud-based banking platform from Google-inspired fintech Thought Machine.