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We have an important role to play in creating a more sustainable and inclusive future.
Our report provides an update on how we are Helping Britain Prosper in a way that delivers long-term profit and returns.
We put you first, so you can put our customers first.
Our report provides an update on how we are Helping Britain Prosper in a way that delivers long-term profit and returns.
Disclosures relating to our strategic, financial, operational, environmental and social performance.
See all the key dates in the financial year.
Higher, more sustainable returns as we continue to Help Britain Prosper.
With hubs across the UK, there's a place for you.
We're searching for the best talent to join us in Leeds.
Join us as we explore new ideas and technologies to reshape the world of finance.
Working with us gives you access to some of the UK’s household brands.
Over the past few years, two powerful trends have reshaped financial services in parallel. And though they’ve often been discussed separately, it’s increasingly impossible to ignore them together.
Artificial intelligence has moved from experimentation to everyday commodity at remarkable speed. What was once specialised is now widely accessible, and we’re seeing AI becoming more embedded into tools, products and workflows.
The way money moves has evolved just as dramatically. Payments that once took days now settle in seconds. Customers expect value to move instantly, invisibly, and across borders and platforms without friction.
These shifts have transformed both decision-making and execution. What they have not yet done is fundamentally change how the two interact. But that’s beginning to change.
Individually, AI and distributed ledger technology (DLT) represent a significant transformation, while together they raise a more provocative question: are we witnessing two separate technology trends maturing at the same time, or the early stages of a deeper merging that will redefine financial infrastructure itself? In short, are we seeing coincidence – or convergence?
These two technologies are often framed as part of the same innovation wave, though in reality they solve very different problems:
Individually, both are powerful, but the real shift happens when they begin to reinforce each other.
However, there is still a gap between deciding and doing. Insights can be generated faster than systems can act on them, or transactions can be executed faster than meaningful decisions are made. When that gap closes, the implications are far more significant than incremental efficiency, and will enable entirely new operating models for financial services.
What’s changed recently is the rise of AI agents. These systems don’t just analyse information – they can monitor data, make decisions and trigger actions across multiple systems.
At the same time, DLT infrastructure means those actions can be taken automatically through smart contracts – essentially pre-defined digital agreements that run themselves when certain conditions are met, such as moving funds, transferring assets or releasing collateral.
Bring the two together, and you get something new: decisions that don’t just sit as insight, but are carried through into execution end-to-end.
When AI and DLT converge, finance shifts from discrete transactions to continuous orchestration. Some of the emerging use cases illustrate this clearly:
There is, however, a fundamental constraint in that today’s financial infrastructure is not designed for this model. It’s built around account-based money, human-led decisions, and sequential, system-by-system processing.
By contrast, AI agents are continuous, multi-step and cross-system, and DLT is programmable, interoperable and multi-instrument. This creates a structural mismatch. As AI capability accelerates, the infrastructure it runs on must evolve in parallel. Without that evolution, we risk increasing speed and complexity without improving outcomes.
This shift also changes the interface. For decades, the bank account has been the centre of financial life, storing money and enabling transactions. In a DLT, AI-enabled world, that model begins to give way to digital wallets.
These are fundamentally different to a bank account, and can:
Increasingly, wallets become not just a container for value, but a control layer where individuals define what agents can see, decide and do. This is critical, because it brings us to the most important challenge of all. Trust.
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There is a tendency to assume that technologies like distributed ledgers reduce the need for trust, when in reality they change where trust sits and how it is structured.
In a system where AI makes decisions and DLT infrastructure executes them, trust must be embedded more deeply into the system itself. This includes:
Speed alone does not create trust. In fact, as decision-making and execution accelerate, trust becomes more, not less, critical.
This shift is no longer theoretical, and the scale of activity in digital assets continues to grow rapidly, with trillions of dollars of value already moving through DLT systems.
We are moving from experimentation to early implementation. The shift is uneven, faster in some areas than others, but increasingly structural.
So where does this leave us? AI and DLT can evolve independently. Each will continue to drive significant change on its own. But when they come together, they unlock something fundamentally different. Agentic AI will transform decisions and execution, while DLT transforms value mobility and its programmability.
The real question is not whether this convergence is happening, but whether we can design the foundations – infrastructure, governance and trust – to support it safely and at scale. Because those foundations will determine whether this transformation delivers real value, or simply introduces new risks.
At Lloyds Banking Group we’ve already started this journey, building those foundations that can support machine-led execution. We’re investing in wallet-ready capabilities and digital asset infrastructure, with around GenAI use cases going live in 2025 generating, circa £50 million of P&L benefit, with more than £100 million expected in 2026.
This is ultimately a moment of architectural choice. The technologies themselves are advancing rapidly. The harder challenge lies in how they are applied and how systems are redesigned around them.
The opportunity is significant. The convergence of AI and DLT infrastructure has the potential to define the next era of financial services, reshaping how value moves, how decisions are made, and how systems interact.
It will also reshape competition across markets and geographies. Which raises a final, unavoidable question: not whether this future will emerge, but who will build it, and where it will be led.
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