21 Million Lloyds’ Customers to Get AI-powered Digital Finance Coach

Lloyds Banking Group is rolling out the UK’s first large-scale, multi-feature AI-powered financial assistant. The assistant, which will be embedded in Lloyds’ mobile banking app, will be made available to 21 million users in early 2026 and will offer an agentic AI solution capable of handling complex customer queries autonomously. Customers will be able to ask questions in natural language and receive instant answers while if a query proves too complex, AI will seamlessly hand off to a human colleague.

According to Lloyds’ own studies, 56 percent of UK adults have used AI in the past year to help manage their money. However, that same research also highlights a growing trust gap, with 80 percent of users expressing concern about inaccurate or outdated information from AI. These concerns have likely arisen due to the fact that most consumers who use AI for financial advice use mainstream solutions like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. After all, generative AI has yet to become widely embedded in customer-facing financial use cases like mobile banking apps, due partly to the highly regulated nature of the industry.

Lloyds’ upcoming AI assistant aims to address those concerns with a proprietary system based on tits own generative AI and agentic framework trained on its own data. By contrast, mainstream frontier models like ChatGPT offer no visibility into their training data and little insight into how they come to their conclusions, thus making them inherently risky for use cases like financial advice. Lloyds, on the other hand, establishes its own guardrails to ensure that the outputs of its AI are explainable and fully compliant with industry standards and regulations.

“Our AI financial assistant is underpinned by LBG’s robust AI assurance framework and guardrails, helping deliver safe, explainable and regulated AI-driven interactions,” Ranil Boteju, chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds Banking Group, was quoted as saying by The Fintech Times. “Importantly, it provides instant and free access to personalised financial coaching.”

Like many other financial services institutions, Lloyds’ intention is to embed AI throughout their long-term business strategy, in this case expanding its use across products like mortgages, insurance, and car financing. While critics might label such initiatives as a gimmick, the reality is that consumers are already using generative AI for financial decision-making—as Lloyds’ studies show—and now it falls to financial services companies and fintechs to make sure they can do so safely. That in itself is a major value driver for the sector too, as demand—along with the widening trust gap—demonstrate. Indeed, it won’t be long before AI will become an expectation among customers and not just something that’s “nice to have.”