Lloyds Banking Group has unveiled Athena, a generative AI tool aimed at improving customer service delivery and towards the banking group’s digital transformation.
In what is said to be the bank’s first large-scale genAI deployment, Athena will work as a knowledge hub to help customer service staff navigate the organisation’s 13,000 internal information articles.
According to the bank, it is already saving employees’ time; average search times have dropped from 59 seconds to 20, reducing customer wait times by two-thirds.
With 28 million customers and roughly two million service interactions per month across phone and digital channels, Lloyds is betting on Athena to streamline how staff handle customer queries.
“Delivering outstanding service to our customers has always been our priority and, with Athena, our colleagues can support our customers faster and more effectively than ever before,” said Pete Steel, consumer engagement director at Lloyds Banking Group.
Launched earlier this year, Athena has handled more than 2.1 million searches by 21,000 Lloyds staff. It plans to expand usage across other customer-facing teams, with a target of 40 million searches by the end of 2025.
According to Lloyds, even focusing just on telephone banking, Athena will help save over 4,000 hours annually by speeding up internal searches – time that can now be spent on resolving complex customer issues.
The rollout of Athena is part of a broader digital transformation strategy at Lloyds, which anticipates at least £50 million in revenue growth and productivity gains from AI initiatives in 2025.
“Athena is a monumental leap in our digital and strategic evolution,” said Ranil Boteju, group chief data and analytics officer. “This technology isn’t just an upgrade – it’s a revolution… The future of work is here, and we’re leading the charge.”
Lloyds launches blockchain trial
The news comes as Lloyds Banking Group partners with Aberdeen Investments and digital asset exchange Archax in a pilot using tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) as collateral for foreign exchange trades.
The collaboration saw tokenised units of Aberdeen’s money market fund and UK gilts used in FX trades between Aberdeen and Lloyds, with assets issued and transferred via Archax’s FCA-regulated infrastructure on the Hedera Hashgraph blockchain.
This trial aims to prove that digital assets can serve as regulated collateral in a high-volume environment, potentially enhancing efficiency, automating compliance, and reducing operational risk.
Emily Smart, chief product officer at Aberdeen Investments, said: “This demonstrates the ability of digital assets to streamline processes and increase efficiency.”
Peter Left, head of digital finance at Lloyds, called the move “a major step forward” in showing how tokenisation can “enhance collateral efficiency and unlock new trading opportunities.”
Graham Rodford, CEO of Archax, added that the project “established another key digital milestone” for the UK’s financial system.
