As part of an ambitious programme to move its lending infrastructure to the cloud, Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) has transformed its operations with FICO® Platform, enabling over £7 billion in annual loans. By leveraging real-time data ingestion and advanced analytics, the platform has helped to drive a 2.5% credit card approval uplift, double new-to-bank consumer loan customers, and resolve over 50 system limitations — delivering faster, smarter, and more efficient lending decisions across products.

This transformation addressed the limitations of LBG’s aging lending infrastructure, which struggled to support growth and evolving customer needs. Fragmented systems created inconsistencies across digital channels and made it difficult to integrate new data assets essential for responsible lending, scalability, and sustainability.

“It became clear that our lending infrastructure was becoming a barrier to the strategic growth ambitions of the bank,” noted Ian Rockliffe, head of Consumer Credit Risk Transformation at Lloyds Banking Group. “We needed the ability to scale to meet our customers’ needs within the digital channels. We also needed to bring in new data assets to support growth, sustainability and enhance our responsible lending position.

“Working with FICO we have been able to simplify the whole technology estate and implement a market-leading cloud-based infrastructure. This delivers major technology enhancements and other significant benefits. We serve one out of every two households in the UK, and these changes help us say ‘yes’ to more customers.”

This major transformation has delivered several firsts for LBG, including the launch of a new cloud-based application viewer for underwriters and other teams. Since going live on FICO® Platform, LBG has introduced a significant bureau data upgrade that was completed in weeks—compared to months in the past—highlighting the platform’s ability to accelerate innovation and operational efficiency.

Nikhil Behl, president, Software at FICO, added: “Not only has the new integration helped LBG to fundamentally change its technology, the Group has also adopted a truly agile approach when delivering technical and business change. Upgrades no longer take months or years, but can be completed within minutes and days, providing significant operational efficiencies.”

With FICO Platform, LBG used the opportunity to mathematically optimise its strategies, and rules and can now share logic and components across portfolios, enabling a more consistent customer experience, and accelerating speed of change.

Modernizing Legacy Systems with Seamless Integration

LBG had more than 20 on-premises applications and complex data flows in its legacy lending infrastructure. The project required a large data mapping exercise to understand where derivations or changes to the data could be occurring through the various systems and what these would look like going forward. This enabled LBG and FICO to prepare downstream users of the data for changes, or amend the new data in order to not impact them at all. “This was a huge undertaking, given the prevalence of the decision data and bureau data across the business, but implementation was efficient and seamless,” said Rockliffe.

“We are already seeing great results on loans due to the bureau data upgrade, and expect to see the same on cards,” Rockliffe added. “Our new lending infrastructure, with FICO Platform at its core, has allowed us to scale and adapt to deliver another key strategic delivery for the group, bringing eligibility assessments in-house for credit cards. Importantly, we are also seeing robust performance of the new architecture, ensuring we are there to meet the lending needs of our customers 24/7.”

For its achievements, LBG won a 2025 FICO® Decision Award for Cloud Deployment.

“Lloyds’ achievement goes far beyond a typical system upgrade — it’s a transformation that redefines what’s possible with cloud technology in banking. The judges were particularly impressed by the team’s ability to tackle legacy complexity with a data-driven approach, using decision intelligence to modernize decision-making at scale,” said Megha Kumar, research vice president at IDC and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges.