Lloyds plans to save another £2 billion by 2030, with AI as the main new tool. It has told its shareholders where the money goes

When Lloyds Banking Group published its half-year results on 30 July, it put a number on what technology has saved it, and said where the next saving is meant to go.

The bank says it made more than £2 billion of gross cost savings between 2022 and 2026. It lists four ways: making staff more productive, modernising its technology, moving more customer contact online and shrinking its offices. Over the same period, it says, the number of retail customers served per full-time member of staff rose by more than 45 per cent, and technology running costs fell by about 35 per cent.

The next £2 billion

Its new plan, Accelerate 2030, aims to save around £2 billion more by 2030. The old levers carry on. The new one the bank names is AI, which it says will drive "a productivity step-change". It expects generative AI alone to be worth over £100 million to the bank this year.

It also wants its cost:income ratio, the pence it spends to earn each pound, to fall from 50.4 per cent in the first half of 2026 to under 45 per cent by 2030.

Where the bank says the money goes

The bank says higher investment will increasingly be paid for out of these savings. Looking back, it says the savings of recent years helped support around £17 billion of payouts to shareholders since 2021.

In the same results it raised its interim dividend by 30 per cent, to 1.58p a share, about £918 million. It announced a further share buyback of up to £1 billion, on top of £1.75 billion announced in January. Statutory profit before tax was £4.3 billion, up from £3.5 billion a year earlier. Operating costs were flat at £4.9 billion, which the bank puts down partly to continued savings and lower severance costs.

What the strategy does not set out

In setting out the strategy, the bank does not say what share of the savings it expects to reach customers through prices or savings rates, or its 67,000 staff through pay or hours. It has no duty to. Half-year results are written for shareholders, and on their own terms these ones are specific.

We have written to Lloyds to ask both questions, and how many full-time staff it employed at the end of June compared with 2022. We will publish its answer in full when it comes.

We have been here before. On 7 July our Ground Truth desk argued, under the headline "We are promised the machine will hand us our time back. The clearest case on record handed it to the balance sheet instead", that a decade of bank branch closures sent the saving to the balance sheet. What is new is a bank naming an AI saving in advance, with a date and a destination.

Why it matters here

Lloyds is in the FTSE 100. If your workplace pension or ISA tracks the UK stock market, there is a good chance you own a small slice of it, and so a small slice of that buyback. You may also be one of its 28 million retail customers. The same saving could show up as a better rate on your savings, a bigger payout in your pension, or an easier week for the people who answer the bank's phones. The bank has told its shareholders which it is planning for.

Lloyds has been reported to use AI models from several makers, including Anthropic, which builds the models this paper's analysts run on. We report on this from inside the industry, and we tell you so.