Venture Strategy Lead

Job Title: Venture Strategy Lead
Location: Manchester
Salary: £78,098 - £91,880
Hours:  Full time
Working Pattern: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in office a week.

About us

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. Including you!

About this opportunity:

Lloyds Banking Group is scaling its disruptive innovation capability using Spark, our evidence‑led venture‑building framework spanning Explore → Accelerate → Commercialise. As part of the Venture Strategy team, you will own and lead end‑to‑end Explore phases, shaping opportunity areas linked to our 2030 strategy and turning ambiguity into compelling, venture‑ready propositions. Your work will directly accelerate our ability to generate and advance Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 opportunities aligned with our mission to shape the future of financial services for LBG.

You’ll combine creativity, structured strategic thinking and commercial rigour. You will map LBG’s right‑to‑win, facilitate cross‑functional collaboration, and deliver sharp, evidence‑based venture briefs that allow the wider team to progress faster into validation sprints. You’ll also support the wider Group Innovation team in our mission to shape the future of financial services for LBG through Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 innovation efforts.

What You’ll Do
 

• Lead high‑energy Explore cycles, turning ambiguous opportunity spaces into sharp, insight‑driven directions for LBG’s future ventures.

• Decode emerging trends, customer behaviours, technology shifts and regulatory forces to spot bold opportunities with real strategic edge.

• Unearth deep customer insight through targeted discovery and jobs‑to‑be‑done research, surfacing pains, needs and 10x moments worth solving.

• Map LBG’s internal superpowers — data, capabilities, channels and relationships — to define where we can create disproportionate advantage.

• Work across silos to co‑create breakthrough concepts, shaping multi‑disciplinary opportunities that couldn’t exist within a single business unit.

• Conduct market, competitor and ecosystem analysis to identify whitespace, disruptors and partnership potential.

• Shape high‑conviction venture briefs and early business models, translating insights into clear value propositions, target segments, and strategic narratives.

• Feed Explore insights into the wider Group Innovation portfolio, supporting our mission to shape the future of financial services through Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 innovation.

What you’ll need
 

• Creative, divergent thinker with the ability to generate bold ideas, then converge into structured hypotheses backed by evidence.

• Commercially rigorous strategist with strong modelling capability and the ability to connect opportunity, business model and market logic.

• Detail‑orientated system thinker, comfortable synthesising complex internal and external data into simple, compelling narratives.

• Highly effective facilitator and storyteller who brings cross‑functional groups together and influences at all organisational levels.

• Hands‑on venture shaper who loves ambiguity, designs experiments, and moves fast with evidence.
   

Useful experience
 

• Experience in corporate innovation, venture studios, business design, strategy consulting or product strategy with a focus in financial services.

• Experience creating business models, value propositions, market analyses and early commercial assessments

• Familiarity with financial services, fintech, and the technology landscape.

• Strategic foresight or emerging‑tech analysis experience aligned to corporate innovation trends

It would be great if you also had
 

• Track record of shaping early opportunities into investable venture briefs, with clear evidence of what was validated, invalidated or killed.

• A portfolio of successful innovation projects demonstrating impact on business growth.

• A track record of building strong relationships with external partners and ecosystem players.

• Familiarity with lean start up methodology

What great looks like (first 6–12 months)
 

• Support team delivery of ~30 sharp venture opportunities across LBG, with strong evidence and sponsor engagement.

• A 2027–2030 venture thesis that articulates future markets, customer shifts and LBG’s right‑to‑win in key opportunity spaces.

• Explore outputs that reduce time to validate and increase promotion rates into POV supported by strong business sponsorship and the right sized opportunity being identified.

• Development of reusable Explore toolkits, AI‑accelerators and synthetic‑testing frameworks that materially improve team speed.

• Recognition as a trusted strategic thinker, with BUs proactively seeking Explore cycles from GI.

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in/all its forms.

We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.

And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups.

We’re disability confident. So, if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%.

• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance.

• Share schemes including free shares.

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top.

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies.

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow and thrive? Apply today and find out more.