James is editor in chief of TechForge Media, with a passion for how technologies influence business and several Mobile World Congress events under his belt. James has interviewed a variety of leading figures in his career, from former Mafia boss Michael Franzese, to Steve Wozniak, and Jean Michel Jarre. James can be found tweeting at @James_T_Bourne.











Google Cloud continues to secure the big-ticket clients, with the company announcing that Lloyds Banking Group is set to embark on its ‘cloud transformation’ journey with Google.

The bank is investing a total of £3 billion ($3.9bn) between 2018 and 2020 in wider IT initiatives, and in this five-year deal, Lloyds will deploy various Google Cloud services focused around the customer experience. Google Cloud will also ensure that Lloyds engineers are trained to ‘enhance disciplines… all in an effort to boost efficiency and offer innovative new services to the bank’s retail and commercial customers.’

“The size of our digital transformation is huge and Google Cloud’s capabilities will help drive this forward, increasing the pace of innovation, as well as bringing new services to our customers quickly and at scale,” said Zaka Mian, group transformation director at Lloyds in a statement. “This collaboration gives us a strategic advantage to continue as a leader in banking technology.”

Alongside retail and healthcare, financial services is one of the three primary customer target areas for Google. HSBC is arguably the best-known financial customer, with the company speaking at Google Next as far back as 2017. In September Srinivas Vaddadi, delivery head for data services engineering at HSBC, elaborated on the bank’s ongoing process of moving its legacy data warehouse onto BigQuery. Other Google Cloud financial services customers include PayPal, Ravelin, and Charles Schwab.

Recent customer wins include Major League Baseball, who is discontinuing its relationship with Amazon Web Services as a result, and Hedera Hashgraph.

“Banking customers today expect secure access to their funds, without downtime, and delivered through the modern experiences they receive in other aspects of their lives,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “We are proud to work with such a storied institution as Lloyds, which helped to create – and continues to redefine – the next generation of financial services.”

Picture credit: Lloyds Branch Manchester Exterior, by Money Bright, used under CC BY 2.0

Update 1320 GMT: A previous version of this article incorrectly referenced the £3bn Lloyds Banking Group is spending, saying it was on the partnership with Google Cloud rather than as a wider technological investment. This has since been corrected.

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