Lloyds Group partners with Google on big data analytics project to understand customers

Lloyds Banking group has announced that it is working with Google on a big data project to analyse its customer behaviour. It has formed a digital analytics team with Google and ASI (Advanced Skills Institute).

Under the partnership, the London–based bank will use Google's analytics platform and tools like Google Big Query, Data Flow and Big Table (that includes internal analytics tools such as Dremel, Map Reduce and more), to test the non-personal behaviour of its customers. The insights gained from this drive will help the 250-year-old bank to understand consumer requirements and serve them accordingly in real time.

"Right at the start of the partnership we were able to reduce time to insight from 96 hours to 30 minutes by using BigQuery, allowing us to react in real time to customer needs and provide better service," Gary Sanders, head of Lloyds bank's digital analytics team, told Banking Technology. A joint team from Lloyds and Google worked in a trial project and was able to analyse a year's worth of front-end analytical data in under a minute.

"This is the first time we've done something like this with a bank, and it's placed Lloyds about 18 months ahead of peers in the use of data analytics," said Reza Rokni, cloud platform solution engineer at Google.

The bank also absorbed two Ph D students from Cambridge and Warwick to run data science experiments after an eight-week fellowship project with them. The bank is also said to be using other latest technology tools like machine learning.

"Having colleagues join from academia as well as industry has allowed the team to have diversity of skillset and perspective," a bank spokesperson said.

In pursuit of getting an understanding of the digital and financial capability of UK consumers, every year the bank conducts a survey of over a million customers. The latest UK Consumer Digital Index 2016 revealed that as many as 11.1 million people have a low digital capacity and 86% of the people who manage their money online "worry less because they can track their finances".