Lloyds Banking Group has partnered with ASI (Advanced Skills Institute) and Google to test Google’s big data platform technologies and analytics on non-personal behavioural data using a “secure” Lloyds account on Google Cloud Platform. Lloyd’s digital analytics team – an in-house team – has been trained by Google on how to use the product and its digital capabilities.

Tools included Big Query, Data Flow and Big Table (the “openly accessible” version of Google’s internal analytics tools Dremel, Map Reduce [Hadoop] and Big Table respectively).

Lloyds says having these tools in place allows for massive, low-cost analyses of anonymised datasets. For example, the team was able to analyse a year’s worth of front-end analytical data in under a minute.

This project fits within a wider collaboration with Google which, in the last 18 months, has supported a rapid acceleration of Lloyds’ ambition to improve its digital marketing and provide a shift in its digital mindset. As well as the tools from Google, the team is examining the wider market – including machine learning, the application of AI and advanced algorithms. This means Lloyds is open to other offers.