That’s the title of a slide published by the Relationship Growth team last week.
If Relationship Managers and Relationship Growth Coaches are not achieving the expectations for the roles, then they’ll be fast tracked out of the business. Selling is no longer a dirty word anymore. According to Lloyds there needs to be a shift towards a ‘high performance culture’ and in Relationship Growth that invariably means more sales and more referrals.
At a recent investment presentation attended by the Union, Mr Charlie Nunn, Group Chief Executive Officer, said:
“For the growth objectives that we have laid out…….we don’t need 100 per cent of our customers to consolidate 100 per cent of their wallet with us, we actually need relatively marginal gains to get significant upside. And if you remember back to February ’22, one of the metrics we talked about, we talked about a depth of relationship on the retail customers, and it declined from 2.7 to 2.4 products per year, I think, over the last decade. We are talking about that back up, 0.1/ 0.2 could make a significant difference.”.
Fair enough, because the Bank is a commercial enterprise, but those so-called marginal gains will be very difficult to achieve in such a fragmented market. He only needs to ask the last three Chief Executives all of whom said the same, albeit from different starting positions. They all left having failed to deliver, although that never seemed to stop them getting massive share options.
What’s different this time is that those managing the Relationship Growth area have made it clear from day one that nothing less than individual success will be acceptable. The individual performance of Relationship Managers will be reviewed bi-weekly by Relationship Growth Coaches together with Senior Managers, and we expect the first support plans to be put in place by the end of May. The same will go for all managers in Relationship Growth. They will all be under the same pressure to deliver in the short-term.
And the same also applies to Ms Jayne Jones, Relationship Growth Director. If she doesn’t achieve the marginal gains necessary for Mr Nunn to achieve his strategic objectives, then she’ll be out the door. Unfortunately for Ms Jones, she’s not a member of the largest, independent trade union in Lloyds Banking Group. As my colleague Emma Stopford said in a recent Newsletter on dodgy performance management:
“Contacting us after months of criticism and at the end of an informal performance plan, with a formal plan about to start, is a recipe for major problems.
We need to hear from members as soon as there is any hint of criticism of their performance or as soon as it becomes obvious that for whatever reason it is not possible to deliver what line managers want with the resources and time available.”.
Members have been warned: the pressure is going to be immediate, so contact us when it starts.
The Relationship Growth team is a blunt instrument set up by Lloyds to hit its strategic targets in the short-term. According to Chira Barua, CEO, Insurance, Pensions & Investments, personalised bancassurance using mobile/internet banking will be how it achieves its growth targets after 2026. In a recent presentation Mr Barua said:
“So, there’s lots of opportunities in the bank assurance space in the past, than we think about it. But going back to what has changed, again, I will call out the three things which are the most important from the way it was done in the past. The first is technology.
Technology in terms of mining the data so that you can put the product that we don’t sell. We know when you have moments of truth. We know when you’re building up your cash to an equity that’s going into a house. So, it is right that I introduce a home insurance and a protection product at that time. So, that’s become quite brilliant. Then in terms of digital proposition, I talked about the last one that’s become much easier.
And the third is the AI tools that you can actually use to look at something which we are talking with the regulator around to monitor all these processes, the digital guidance and advice that Jo talked about. So there’s a lot of technology right now, which is upfront, which allows you to do it much better than it was done in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The second one is customers. Customers can engage digitally. Bank assurance doesn’t need to be sold in a brick and mortar environment. Customers draw it down from the proposition that you lay out.”.
That all sounds all well and good but Lloyds is at least a decade behind the banks that are already doing personalised banking using state of the art IT platforms. Lloyds is still running on a core banking platform that’s older than me!! The Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) may be the ‘North Star’ that Lloyds is seeking to emulate, but it’s years away from achieving that level of digital personalisation. We want the Bank to succeed in delivering higher profits of course but this is not going to be pain-free.
We will be carrying out a survey of all those members in Relationship Growth at the end of May.
In the meantime, members who come under pressure to sell more should contact the Union’s Advice Team for advice and guidance on 01234 262868 (Choose Option 1).
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