Lloyds Banking Group has agreed on a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to further push its digital transformation work.

The deal comes under Lloyd’s £3 billion internal investment to upgrade its IT systems to compete in the increasingly digitised world of finance.

The UK-based bank, which serves 26 million customers, will collaborate with Google Cloud to help drive its overall cloud transformation programme and streamline its operations. The five-year “strategic collaboration” will see Lloyds use a number of Google Cloud services to help modernise and improve its customer experience.

This will also include Google Cloud experts on-site to enhance engineering processes, all in an effort to boost efficiency and offer innovative new services to the bank’s retail and commercial customers.

“Banking customers today expect secure access to their funds, without downtime, and delivered through the modern experiences they receive in other aspects of their lives,” says Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO.

“We are proud to work with such a storied institution as Lloyds, which helped to create – and continues to redefine – the next generation of financial services.”

In 2018, Lloyds announced a partnership with Thought Machine, investing £11 million in upgrading its IT infrastructure. That came with announcements of 6,000 jobs cuts with a promise to create 8,000 more digital ones in the near future.

“As the UK’s largest digital bank we have made strong progress in transforming not only our systems but also how we work,” said Zaka Mian, group transformation director, Lloyds Banking Group.

“The size of our digital transformation is huge and Google Cloud’s capabilities will help drive this forward, increasing the pace of innovation, as well as bringing new services to our customers quickly and at scale.”