By Lloyds Banking Group, October 10, 2017.
To help curb the challenges people face with money management and financial exclusion, Tech City UK, have launched a competition dubbed “Fintech For All”.
As part of our purpose to Help Britain Prosper, Lloyds Banking Group has joined forces with Tech City UK to find and support young companies that use new technologies to improve financial capability. The winning two companies will have access to experienced Lloyds mentors through our Fintech Mentoring Programme, who can support them with strengthening their business models, refining their concepts and facilitating effective partnerships in the industry.
The world we live in is changing fast. Almost everything we do is driven and powered intelligently by some form of digital technology. And similarly, within the financial space, this continues to be a running theme.
The days of saving in a piggy bank are over. There’s a movement fusing digital technology with financial products and services and we’re seeing innovation, disruption of the status quo and a channelling of the do-it-yourself mentality, all for a singular cause: to make financial products and services easier to understand and more accessible to all.
At Lloyds Banking Group, we strongly believe that to help everyone prosper and participate fully in everyday life, people should have access to financial services in ways that best suit their needs. If they don’t, this can affect education, employment, health, housing and our general well-being.
We’re continually improving the way we digitally interact with customers to ensure inclusion and accessibility are at the front of our minds and have become the first FTSE 100 company to have a brand independently accredited by AbilityNet for accessibility across all devices.
We’re also not only introducing intuitive apps and platforms, but busily looking for ways to be more innovative and inclusive. Like helping to create awareness and also improve our customer’s digital and financial literacy; including having over 25,000 Digital Champions who have volunteered to improve the digital skills of individuals, charities and businesses throughout the country.
We believe it’s important to help foster the development of the financial services sector too and in 2016, Lloyds Banking Group launched a Fintech Mentoring scheme that sees Fintech start-ups across the UK benefit from the broad expertise of its colleagues from across the Group. We’re currently connected with over 80 start-ups through the programme, sharing knowledge and expertise between parties that wouldn’t easily get to meet.
We will continue to unravel new ways of including our customers financially to ensure that financial inclusion no longer becomes a pressing issue in today’s world, and are delighted to support other individuals and organisations driven by the same mission.
The deadline to apply to the Fintech for All competition is 20th October 2017. Learn more about how you can apply or be a part of this great initiative on the competition website.