Lloyds Banking Group is collaborating with Google on a project to dig deeper into its data sets and unlock hidden trends in customer behaviour.

The partnership with Google allowed Lloyds to test technology giant’s Big Data platform technologies and analytics on non-personal behavioural data using a secure Lloyds Banking Group account on Google Cloud Platform. Tools included Big Query, Data Flow and Big Table (the openly accessible version of Google’s internal analytics tools Dremel, Map Reduce (Hadoop) and Big Table respectively).



In a trial project, a joint Lloyds and Google team was able to analyse a year’s worth of front-end analytical data in under a minute.



Gary Sanders, head of the bank's digital analytics function, states, “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, and we were able to do this in a quick six week proof of concept. Such early success helped cement our partnership and motivated teams to work in an agile way.”



Reza Rokni from Google says: "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.”



Lloyds has created a dedicated digital analytics unit that looks to work with a myriad of partners to further its knowledge and prototype applications using the latest tools.



One such partnership with the Advanced Skills Unit saw the bank offer two eight-week fellowships to PhDs from Cambridge and Warwick to run data science experiments, which led to them both joining the team full time.



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