Lloyds Banking Group to splash £3bn on tech

Lloyds Banking Group is to splash £3bn on IT investment, amid a major outsourcing and cost-cutting programme. In a trading update, the Halifax, Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland brands owner revealed its "business transformation" budget had increased 40 per cent on the previous year. It also reported bumper pre-tax profit for …

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of that spend...

will find its way into the pockets of UK Companies/citizens?

This money will no doubt fund the nice new IT Develpment hub and DC (plus backup) somewhere in S. Asia where all our highly skilled IT Jobs are heading at a great rate of knots these days.

[tiggity]

Re: How much of that spend...

@ Anonymous Coward

"somewhere in S. Asia where all our highly skilled IT Jobs are heading at a great rate of knots these days"

I'm noyt convinced the S. Asia jobs are all high skilled - outsourcers just charge as if they were.

BTW, you neglected to mention the increased chances for fraud / customer data leaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How much of that spend...

You misunderstand.

Lloyds outsourced to IBM.

This is just the additional spend required to do the things they wanted to do before the outsourcing but weren't explicitly specified in the contract. Oh - and they get IBM's "service" and delivery timeframes wrapped around it.

Perhaps the motto should be "With IBM you're not just fscked, you're globally fscked...."

[macjules]

Marketing Babblespeak translation

strategic initiatives - We are giving everyone a copy of Powerpoint so we can have lots of useless presentations being emailed around the company

a "digitised" bank - Just our little joke, we have always been a "digitised" bank, of course.

progressive modernisation of our data - We no longer store your login details in a plain-text cookie

progressive modernisation of our data and IT infrastructure As above, but also our databases now use MD5 Hash encryption (sometimes, well occasionally)

[Warm Braw]

Lloyds Banking Group...

... have just sent an e-mail to my now long-deceased aunt saying that they're suspending her access to the online banking accounts that were closed on her death owing to lack of recent use. It's not a phishing e-mail (it tracks back through MessageLabs to a Lloyds banking group IP address and contains identifying personal information), so I assume investment in IT is rather overdue...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Lloyds Banking Group...

" so I assume investment in IT is rather overdue..."

Yes they missed out the steps where they hound you for months to pay of a debt that never existed.

[JimboSmith]

Re: Lloyds Banking Group...

And Lloyds wonder why I don't use Internet Banking with them. Given their communication is often useless electronic or otherwise it shouldn't be a surprise really. They would do better to retain good people in the business as well as beefing up security etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove the hype and check the reality

"Lloyds Banking Group is to splash £3bn on IT investment, amid a major outsourcing and cost-cutting programme."

Translation

"Lloyds Banking Group is to splash £1bn on IT redundacies, £1bn on consultancy and £1 billion on a new swanky office with some cheap labour where customers will complain about the crap service and details being leaked, but hey who cares. Profit!"

[hplasm]

Re: Remove the hype and check the reality

ITYM

""Lloyds Banking Group is to splash £1M on IT redundacies, £100M on consultancy and the rest on bonuses, yachts and swanky new offices."

[Mark 85]

Re: Remove the hype and check the reality

Two keywords give all the info one needs to know: outsourcing and cost-cutting. They have sipped the Kool-Aid and started the slid to the bottom.

[steelpillow]

How secure is my financial information?

"As secure as our cloud contractors can be arsed to make it, Sir."

Better check out a few other banks and move my account across before it's too late, sigh.

[Chunky Munky]

Re: How secure is my financial information?

I'm with you on that - lemme just grab me coat

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: How secure is my financial information?

I look forward to all my financial details being available in an unsecures S3 bucket..

(Or I would if I banked with Lloyds - I haven't touched them with someone elses bargepole since my student days when they went from "please have more money" to "you owe us money and we are sending the boys round" in about 2 nanoseconds.. No - I 'bank' with a building society.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Merrygoround

Same old story.

IT empire builder pitches proposition to Board.

"Give me lots of money and I can reduce your costs by getting rid of people and replacing them with shiny new boxes"

Board response "Give us an idea of how you are going to do that"

"The first half of the project will be to do what we promised last time I made this pitch. Anyway it doesn't matter, all we need to do is talk up the market, award ourselves share options and bonuses."

In the long run, what with downsizing and outsourcing very few people will have jobs to earn the money to put in the banks. They will end up being open ended credit agencies backed up by Government loans. A sort of privatised dole.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that Lloyd's or Lloyd's International? Or is it all the same outfit? I wonder what their old head of infrastructure went on to do, seeing as they obviously didn't put in the right sort of kit which is what they are now having to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last IT boss

He retired more than twenty years ago, their kit is that old.

[Milton]

BTW

(The press release shoud have said)

"BTW, none of the forthcoming deluge of outages, downtime, incorrect transactions, failed payments, missing salaries, lost logins, stolen credentials, identity thefts, lost business, emptied accounts, incorrectly addressed letters, compromised financial details, bankruptcies and suicides will have anything at all, whatsoever, to do with the fact that we are shedding good, experienced, well-paid staff who understand our systems and outsourcing everything not nailed down to whichever bunch of clowns was the lowest bidder and placing our secret, confidential, mission-critical data on some cloud, somewhere. Our executives will richly deserve the eyewatering 'cost savings' bonuses they will receive just before they skip off to commence planning their next disaster."

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, most of it will go on IT platforms

At least half will be earmarked for Windows 2003 extended support.

[LucreLout]

Dear Lloyds

There's no point spending £3BN on IT, rather than returning the money to your shareholders, unless you make your current IT situation better. To do that, you need to do ALL of the following things:

1) Stop outsourcing. All of it.

2) Stop offshoring. All of it.

3) Cut half of your IT hierarchy. If you don't show as the lowest two wrungs in the corporate structure diagram then you should have a 50/50 chance of being employed on Monday.

4) Hire a few permanent staff that actually understand software development, code architectures, the cloud, and networking.

5) Send a memo to all staff stating in plain speaking that you are no longer a bank. You are a technology company that handles banking deposits. The real value isn't in your management chain or board of directors. The real value isn't in your front office staff. The real value is in your IT staff.

Getting IT right isn;t hard, you just need the right people and the right plan. The first step forward is to understand that today, you have neither.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dear Lloyds

5) Send a memo to all staff stating in plain speaking that you are no longer a bank. You are a technology company that handles banking deposits. The real value isn't in your management chain or board of directors. The real value isn't in your front office staff. The real value is in your IT staff.

This is true for almost all large businesses providing services. So all mobile telcos, ISPs, fixed line telcos, gas suppliers, electricity suppliers, airlines, logistics companies, banks, insurers. And most don't get it, at all. You can see this because so many of these companies are unable to provide any decent customer service, and I'd single out the telecoms sector in particular because they are useless at all matters of voice or electronic communications.

[Jan 0]

Re: Dear Lloyds

They won't get point 5.

Is it time to move my transactions* to Monzo?

Monzo seems to have grasped point 5

* Well, it's the 21st century. The word money seems to have lost its essence.

[sal II]

Time to buy TCS shares !!!

[low_resolution_foxxes]

From recollection, at least part of this will be spent on the new "cheques on a phone" infrastructure. No longer will I need a 1 hour return journey to cash in cheques.

[a_yank_lurker]

A difference

Over here, my (very large) bank announced expansion plans that included new physical branches which means some jobs that can not be easily outsourced and definitely not offshored.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don’t be silly

IT investment isn’t needed, it’s all been outsourced to IBM to make it cloudy. All the old versions will magically move to the cloud, and become up to date with no risk, code rewrites or testing effort, as that was the reason it couldn’t be done in-house.

All the unbelievably shitty offshore written code from the past decade will all of a sudden not be full of bugs, and will stop resembling something cobbled together by a group of barely competent dribblers, with about a combined total of a days training in java. And the code will resemble nirvana instead.

Testing will all of a sudden involve seeing if the software actually works and vaguely does what you need, rather than if it ticks the pass box on a series of test, unrelated to any requirements or with any consideration of more than the “happy path”, much as I hate that term.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don’t be silly

I'm buying shares in IBM. A ten year contract while digitising the business is a recipe for profits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don’t be silly

IBM got the JPMC contract around 2003/04. Lasted less than a year.

[Unshakeable]

The 40% increase in spending...

Last year, the group inked a 10-year outsourcing deal with IBM, with 1,500 staff and contractors to be transferred over,

aka, we're spending 40% more with the new budget, but it involves IBM so therefore doesnt include anything new or more

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope your info is on the desktop

If they've saved your data to their desktops you'll be fine as that's still in-house!

A/C as ex-employee and knowing people still employed and outsourced to IBM

[Mr Dogshit]

There is no such verb as "to ink"

Repeat after me: "There is no such verb as "to ink" "

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: There is no such verb as "to ink"

Sadly in Americanese there is. Contracts are not signed anymore, they are 'inked'.

Sounds like they are getting a Tattoo to celebrate.

[Z Ippy]

Lloyds Record Keeping

I worked with Lloyds for 11 years before I wanted a change and applied for a job at another business.

All went well, I passed the interview and back-ground checks, except one; Lloyds had claimed that they had no record of me and therefore would not confirm that I worked for them. I wasn't a contractor, I was a salaried bod. This went on for 3 weeks, gave them my name, address, office I worked in, manager, NI number, employee number, copies of my pay-slips etc. but they still told my new employer (who was duty bound to get a reference) that they had no record of me.

Luckily I found a senior director at the new employer who sort of remembered me from when he was at Lloyds and I had to do some menial chores for him.

I wouldn't trust them with anything now.

[FuzzyWuzzys]

So it's the standard IT shafting exercise...

1. Move it to the cloud. ( "Hey, it's the cloud gotta to be cheaper and more trendy, we mean better value!"

2. Make anyone with any sense redundant.

3. Tell the business all about the wonderful new cloud world they will have access to...in about 5 years time

4. A load of failed re-writes by cheap outside of Europe devs that cost 1/10th the cost of European devs.

5. Re-hire all the old IT staff as constractors at twice the rate after you realise that managers you put in charge of the new world order in your infrastructure, realised the cloud is simply the same old IT shit problems but just running on someone else's computers in another company.

[Anonymous Coward]

TUPE

The premise of TUPE is that you can get the same work done, by the same people, on the same salaries, and somehow save money. If someone doesn't see something fishy about this, it's because they don't want to see.

[paulf]

Re: TUPE

AIUI TUPE protections only last for 2 years after transfer, but the contract between LBG and IBM is for 10 years. That translates to me as, 2 years training your replacements in Mumbai then the RA consultation starts exactly 2 years and one day after TUPE transfer was closed (sooner if they can get away with it).