Lloyds Banking Group has announced healthy profits, a share buyback and a three year, £3 billion strategic investment programme, with a strong focus on digital. The banking group announced pre-tax profits of £5.3 billion, a 24 per cent rise on the 2016 figures and the highest profit since 2006, although actually a lower figure than had been predicted by some analysts.

Lloyds says the £3 billion investment programme will be spent on staff and on transforming the business into “a digitised, simple, low risk, customer-focused, UK financial services provider”, which will seek to improve its current multichannel offering, complementing existing services with further “data-driven and personalised customer propositions”. The digitisation programme will include overhauling the vast majority of business processes, “simplification and progressive modernisation of our data and IT infrastructure; and technology enabled productivity improvements across the business”.

Group chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio said the bank’s new strategy would “transform the Group for success in a digital world”.

Some analysts greeted the news of further investment in technology with scepticism, because the banking group has released very little information about how it has spent money on IT in recent years. Nonetheless, this commitment to spend more on IT will prove welcome news for a number of technology and service providers across the UK, presumably including long-term partners such as IBM and TCM.

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