Lloyds has hired ING CTO Ron van Kemenade as COO. Starting June 2023 he will lead a new technology and data strategy at Britain’s biggest domestic bank, under new CEO Charlie Nunn – who joined from HSBC in 2021.
The hire comes as Lloyds said that it is exploring the “potential of new technology architecture, supported by strategic partnerships… and to build confidence in our ability to utilise new cloud-based architecture."
The bank plans to cut legacy applications by 15% and “run and change” IT costs by the same figure by 2024.
Its target for 2024 is to have 20% of applications in the cloud (public or private) and 60% of business new lending decisions automated. To give a sense of the scale it is operating at, Lloyd’s said in its 2021 annual report that it had already decommissioned 12,000 legacy applications and services as part of its modernisation.
It has also moved 45 million customer records, workloads and models to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as part of a five-year strategic agreement with the cloud provider that it signed in 2020 and is currently recruiting widely for GCP specialists including a "GCP Adoption Engineer" for between £52,912 - £66,140. The bank also has a substantial private cloud environment and has been hiring for it, including for staff “specifically focusing on Kubernetes and associated container hosting technologies - ISTIO, NGINX, Portworx etc" as it containerises workloads.
Van Kemenade told ING investors in June 2022 that ING had saved upwards of €100 million in operational expenditure in recent years by consolidating on private cloud – saying that 34% of all the applications worldwide at ING now run on private cloud and he hoped to get the figure to 70% by 2025.
He’s the latest heavyweight technology leader to depart the Dutch multinational: Former ING COO Roul Louwhoff also left in 2021 to take up a role as “Chief Technology, Operations and Transformation Officer” (CTOTO) at Standard Chartered after the departure of Group CIO Dr Michael Gorriz.
