Lloyds Banking Group director of innovation Claire Calmejane understands only too well how hard it is to attract talent in the digital space. She outlines to Joy Macknight how the group is bringing in, upskilling and retaining the right staff.

 Claire Calmejane

At the heart of innovation is a diverse workforce, according to Claire Calmejane, director of innovation at Lloyds Banking Group. She leads a 50-strong team with a wide variety of backgrounds and nationalities. In addition, women hold more than 40% of senior roles within her team, reaching a target set by CEO António Horta-Osório ahead of the group’s 2020 deadline.

Attracting the required skillset was top priority when Ms Calmejane established Lloyds’ innovation lab three years ago. “We talked about the right blend of talent and how we could attract the right people, as ultimately it is our people that deliver satisfaction to the customer. Technology is just the layer in between,” she says.

With this challenge in mind, Lloyds launched the first UK digital banking graduate programme in September 2015. To date it has recruited 40 graduates, currently on rotation across its digital business. The bank also went directly to universities which lead in digital and design, such as the Royal College of Art.

It pays to advertise

The innovation team launched a digital hub, in partnership with the human resources department, to create its own brand image for recruitment. “The hub publishes our stories about what the bank is doing and how it resonates with the customer, in contrast to traditional job advertisements,” says Ms Calmejane.

She uses the example of a recently published interview with Maxine Austin, a Lloyds innovation manager currently on a six-month sabbatical to visit innovation centres around the world. As someone who joined the bank as a teenage apprentice 10 years ago, Ms Austin talks about developing new skills, joining the innovation team and lessons learned as a team member. “That is a much more compelling story from a potential employee perspective than just a job description,” says Ms Calmejane.

Lloyds’ clear digital strategy was what attracted Ms Calmejane to the bank five years ago. “It is a story well articulated to our customers and colleagues,” she says. “Lloyds doesn’t treat digital as a channel but aims to be digital inside and out. And it put the needed resources behind launching a transformation programme in 2015.” Lloyds is committed to investing £1bn ($1.25bn) in digital capability over a three-year period, on top of the £750m it had already invested in the three previous years.

Everyone innovates

In addition to attracting new talent, Ms Calmejane’s team is tasked with injecting a spirit of innovation into the group. To that end, she created a people innovation team, which identifies which jobs need a higher level of proficiency.

Again in partnership with HR, the innovation team launched an in-house digital academy with support from technology training companies. The curriculum is available to all 75,000 employees across the bank.

In addition, the team runs hackathons, weekly 30-minute inspiration sessions called ‘digital espressos’, fintech panels, and innovation guides and toolkits. 

For example, the team ran its Paytastic hackathon in September 2016, working with fintech accelerator Startupbootcamp. “Such an experience encourages colleagues to unleash their innovative spirit and opens up the opportunity to systematically identify current problems in need of solutions,” says Ms Calmejane.

She believes that it is important to fill colleagues with confidence about the innovation process, which takes them out of their comfort zone. “We want them to embrace the notion of experimentation, quick sprints, failures, additional testing and learning.”

Fintech collaboration

Ms Calmejane’s team is also in charge of engaging with the fintech community, working with the likes of Startupbootcamp, Innovate Finance and FCA Project Innovate. This collaboration led to the launch of a fintech mentoring scheme which seeks to match a start-up company with an experienced Lloyds mentor. “Having a sponsor with a vested interest in a project is critical and leads us to production more quickly,” she says.

She created a specific fintech team to assess potential partnerships and act as ‘matchmakers’ with senior leaders. “We raise awareness of what is happening in the fintech world and also debunk the myths,” says Ms Calmejane.

Each year the innovation team oversees about 40 experiments, which total more than 100 to date. “Both Touch ID and selfie technology started in the innovation lab with a sponsor, who helps bring it forward in the business,” says Ms Calmejane.

Touch ID, which uses Apple’s fingerprint authentication technology to log into online banking, was one of the team’s first experiments. Although there was enthusiasm for the technology across the bank, the team could foresee business case challenges. “In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t very expensive, but at the same time we needed to measure return on investment on something that was not widely available in the market,” says Ms Calmejane.

This is where the innovation team’s methods and techniques can provide tangible proof, thanks to short experiment cycles involving customers, receiving feedback and then fine-tuning the product – effectively putting customers at the heart of innovation.

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