#48 Lloyds Banking Group CEO: The End of Halifax and the Future of Bank Branches

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Listen now or search for Good, Bad, Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hello, welcome to Big Boss Interview, I'm Sean Farrington and today we've got Will Bain with us. He's been speaking to Will, the person who runs the UK's biggest mortgage lender and

do a fair bit of the besides as well. Yeah absolutely. This is Charlie Nunn, the boss of Lloyd's Banking Group. So Lloyd's Bank, obviously part of that,

but also Halifax, Scottish Widows, the pensions provider as well. So the biggest lender for mortgages, Sean in the UK, biggest lender,

one of the biggest lenders to our small and medium sized businesses. Obviously a massive employer, thousands of stuff right around the UK.

So there was loads to get into, including, and I mentioned Halifax there, a lot of our listeners I'm sure will know, brand that's been in the news quite a bit recently because after 180 plus years

it's gonna disappear from our high streets so how as a leader do you come to make a big decision like that around tradition so we got into a bit of that as well. Interesting and with I don't know they're always interesting these bosses who have such a connection with so many households around the country

they're kind of bosses that the likes of new prime ministers new chancellors might well listen to. Did anything come out of it in that respect? Absolutely. I kind of make this point a few times in the interview that they just, you know, the amount of business accounts, the amount of personal bank accounts they hold, they're seeing the real data. You know, we and you, we're always talking about these surveys and stuff across our programs that a lot of the trade bodies perhaps will put out or over.

These guys have got the real as-live data of what's going on under the bonnet of the UK economy. So I did try and probe a little bit on that. Very good on the health of the UK economy. very good on where he thinks we're going wrong on growth would not commit to many rumors about

a banking tax as we hear, but I did have a couple of cracks. But yes, a man who made it very clear that he wasn't going to answer that question, but elts a plenty of other things. Right, I look forward to hearing some of that. Let's hear it then, shall we? Here is the Chief Executive of Lloyd's, Charlie Nunn speaking to Will. Charlie Nunn, the Chief Executive of Lloyd's

banking group. Thanks so much for being with us on the Big Boss interview podcast. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Why don't we start then with a bit of news recently? Because the Halifax brand, which is one of your part of your group,

you've decided to not call it Halifax basically anymore. Why? How does that come about after what, 180 years plus? Yes. Having that in.

Look, it's one of these really big decisions you take. But we looked at two or three things really, as you always do, when you're leading a business like Lloyd's Banking Group. The first thing is seeing what our customers are doing.

And increasingly, our customers are looking to research their products through large language models, through the internet, and are looking for the best products that meet their needs. And so how you reach them and how you access them became more and more about having a really strong brand that joins up for our customers. And we realized, based on both Halifax, Lloyd's,

and the half the adults in the UK we serve with Lloyd's banking group, having a single powerful brand would be the best way to serve customers. Second thing is, and we're really excited about this obviously, is when you look at the scope of everything we can do for our customers, our ability to join up and make banking and financial services simple is going to be easier with a single brand.

And those were the two motivations today. And then when you look forward, the world's getting more complex with AI and the way people are going to be looking to access and get advice around financial services. So we think that positions us really well. Really importantly for our customers, they don't need to do anything today.

There'll be no change to account numbers, to cards, to their insurance around their deposits. And then for some customers, we'll be contacting them over the next few months to open their new app and banking services. And they'll get access to everything that Lloyd's banking group can bring to bear.

What is it that becomes easier when you're saying things will be easier going forward? So we have a much broader range of products than those that are linked to just our Halifax customers or Lloyd's customers. So we can bring them much more simply together for our customers. That's the first thing. Second thing is we have a very broad range of touch points

We have colleagues in almost a thousand communities across the UK and we introduce something called co-servicing That's pretty boring as that which means our customers with from whichever brand they're in can access our colleagues in Which ever brand or location in the country they're in and so that makes it easier for customers to get access to us And then

Increasingly customers are turning up in different places, whether it's in online market places in social media researching our products and services through their favorite AI tool and being able to realize that all of the products were the same company. Yeah exactly. Now the one other really important thing we're deeply committed to Scotland we