Lloyds Banking Group has introduced Athena, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to modernise its customer service operations and further its broader digital transformation efforts. Positioned as the bank’s first large-scale deployment of generative AI technology, Athena functions as an internal knowledge engine, enabling staff to quickly access and navigate over 13,000 internal information articles.
The banking group reported that Athena is already delivering notable efficiency improvements. The average time taken by employees to retrieve relevant information has dropped significantly—from 59 seconds to just 20 seconds. This reduction has, in turn, led to a substantial decrease in customer wait times, cutting them by approximately two-thirds. With a customer base of 28 million and close to two million monthly service interactions via phone and digital platforms, Lloyds appears to be leveraging Athena to transform the speed and quality of its customer support.
A senior executive overseeing consumer engagement at Lloyds indicated that enhancing customer service has remained a consistent priority for the group. The introduction of Athena, according to him, equips staff with the tools to assist customers more promptly and efficiently.
Since its launch earlier in the year, Athena has facilitated over 2.1 million searches conducted by around 21,000 Lloyds employees. The bank is now planning to expand the tool’s use across additional customer-facing teams and aims to hit a milestone of 40 million searches by the end of 2025. Within the area of telephone banking alone, Lloyds anticipates that Athena will help save more than 4,000 work hours annually by accelerating internal lookups. The organisation expects that the saved time will be redirected toward resolving more complex customer inquiries.
Athena is a cornerstone of Lloyds’ digital strategy, which is expected to generate at least £50 million in additional revenue and productivity gains through AI-driven initiatives in 2025. The group’s chief data and analytics officer described the deployment as a transformational step in its strategic journey. He suggested that the implementation of Athena represents not merely a technical upgrade but a foundational shift in how the bank approaches work, claiming that Lloyds is positioning itself at the forefront of this technological evolution.
Alongside the AI developments, Lloyds has also ventured into blockchain technology. The bank recently joined forces with Aberdeen Investments and digital asset exchange Archax to trial the use of tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) as collateral in foreign exchange (FX) trading. In this pilot initiative, tokenised versions of Aberdeen’s money market fund units and UK government bonds (gilts) were deployed in FX transactions between Lloyds and Aberdeen. The assets were issued and settled using Archax’s FCA-regulated infrastructure on the Hedera Hashgraph blockchain network.
The objective of this trial was to evaluate the viability of using digital assets as regulated collateral in high-volume financial environments. The initiative aims to demonstrate improvements in operational efficiency, automatic compliance procedures, and reduced risk exposure. A senior product officer at Aberdeen Investments expressed that the trial showcased the potential of digital assets to simplify processes and increase workflow efficiency. The head of digital finance at Lloyds described the pilot as a major advancement, emphasising that tokenisation could optimise collateral use and pave the way for new trading opportunities. Similarly, Archax’s CEO viewed the collaboration as a significant achievement that further reinforced the UK’s growing leadership in digital finance innovation.
By integrating advanced AI and blockchain applications into its operations, Lloyds Banking Group appears to be charting a forward-looking path that blends enhanced customer service with progressive financial technologies.