Helping Britain Prosper: annual report and accounts 2021

Carla: It's just over six months since you joined us as CEO but longer than that since you knew you were coming to the Group. How does it feel now that you're finally here launching it and revealing the new strategy?

Charlie: Well, as you say, it's been a busy few months, few weeks since I've joined. But I have to say the primary thing I've got is I'm just excited. I'm excited that we're going to get to a position when we can start to share all of our priorities with all of our colleagues for Lloyds Banking Group going forwards. So tell us a little bit more now as we go into our new strategy, what are the areas that you think you would like the Group to take in terms of our new focus and new opportunities?

So there's a few key priorities we are laying out today. The first is we've always been a fantastic organisation in terms of having a strong purpose and being the leading financial services group in the UK. But one of the things we're doing in this strategy is we really want to make being purpose led integral to everything we're doing.

And you're going to see that our purpose around Helping Britain Prosper is started to be woven in, in a very detailed way to all of the strategies and the commercial outcomes we're committing to. So that's number one.

The second thing is a growth mindset and a pivot towards growth. And this theme of growth is something we're really excited about helping our customers access more of our great products in a more simple and personalised way.

And then finding areas within the UK consumer and business segments where we can grow Lloyds Banking Group  and then the third and fourth themes all around focus, focus on efficiency and creating the opportunity to recycle our resources for that growth.

And then finally, most important for all of us is how do we build the right organisation, culture and then talent, technology and data to enable that strategy?

And one of the things we're announcing today is a significant investment over and above our run rate investment to enable us to do that.

Carla: Tell us what was the toughest question you've had so far in preparing for this announcement?

Charlie: I think probably the hardest one has been around the cost of living, and the impacts we see for our customers.

Now, I think we've done a lot to prepare to help serve our customers and support our customers over the next 6 and 9 and 12 months.

But there's just huge uncertainty about what's going to happen. And I know there's lots of nervousness in our customers so just thinking through that, how do you respond to that question and say that we've done the most we can to prepare to support our customers.

Carla: So I'm going to pick up on a word that you mentioned a couple of times, growth.

What needs to change for the group to focus on growth?

Charlie: So in summary, there are four opportunities for growing Lloyds Banking Group.

The first is for our consumer segments. It's both deepening our relationships with our existing customers and innovating to bring our brilliant products to get to our customers through our intermediaries.

The second is around creating a new mass affluent proposition that joins up across banking, protection and investments and insurance products.

The third one is around digitising our small and medium sized enterprise and business banking offering and really growing our market share in that area.

And the final one is focusing and growing around our UK linked corporate and institutional businesses with a very focused offering around cash, debt and risk management services.

Carla: Thank you, Charlie.

Charlie: Thank you Carla.