Why we’ve partnered with Women in data…

spotlights

lbg-mc
Michelle Conway
Lead Data Scientist – Consumer Lending
lbgkb
Kiran Bal
Head of Data Management Engagement
lbgag
Alice Genevois
Chapter Lead, Data Science & Applied Ethics
lbgls
Leena Sharma
Technology Platform Lead – Personalised Experience & Communication
lbgaw
Alex Winward
Director – Finance Data & Analytics Office

How lloyds banking group see the data landscape changing in the UK in the next 5 years

The data landscape in the UK continues to rapidly evolve, and our focus is to not only keep up with the latest and best developments and advancements in the world of data, but to fully utilise new tools, new technologies and new skillsets to be able to provide the best service we can for our customers. For us it’s all about personalisation, conversational banking and supporting vulnerable customers. The growth in areas like generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely exciting and we’re looking forward to utilising such technologies in a meaningful way to help our customers, while simultaneously operating in an industry leading ethical framework.

about Lloyds banking group

Lloyds Banking Group has a rich heritage stretching back ov­­er 300 years. In this time LBG has evolved into a market leading financial services group, providing millions of customers with the support and products they need not only for today, but also for the future. Our goal of Helping Britain Prosper is one that permeates through all parts of the organisation and is reflected in our guiding values of putting people first to go further for our customers, being bold, taking action and innovating, being inclusive to value everyone, championing sustainability to care for our planet and trusting each other to achieve more together.

Social Media Details: LinkedIn Instagram

Expertise:

Michelle is a highly experienced Data Scientist with 12 years in the data industry. In 2018, she joined Lloyds Banking Group as part of their machine intelligence programme. She was pleasantly surprised by the excellent culture at the group, which was highly recommended by a colleague at the women in data flagship conference in 2017.

Michelle has a BSc in Mathematical Science majoring in Statistics and a MSc in Data Science. This has given her a strong passion for leveraging data to drive insights and inform strategic decision-making. She is known for her ability to effectively communicate complex concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. She enjoys driving innovation and delivering data-driven solutions to enhance customer experiences and business performance.

Michelle was promoted to Lead Data Scientist early 2023 and works in a high-performance multidisciplinary MLOps team in Consumer Lending. Michelle’s work involves deploying models into production and enabling the business to make data-driven decisions. She was selected as one of the top twenty (Women in Data 2023) and is passionate about building communities for women in the data and tech space. She successfully created a “Data Science Women” community to be help bring women working python-based data science projects together. Michelle has previously worked for BT, Amazon, in insurance and investment banking, building and deploying statistical models.

Originally from Ireland, she is an avid fan of London city and enjoys its rich culture and amazing artworks.

Social Media Details: LinkedIn

Kiran joined Lloyds Banking Group in 2021 as the Group Business Product Owner for Data Quality in the Chief Data & Analytics Office. In this role, she was responsible for ensuring the entire Group adopted the new centralised tool for logging Data Quality issues, flagging material and severe Data Quality issues to board members through various committees and metrics as well as working with the Business Units to ensure Data Quality issues were being remediated at source. Her team were also responsible for feeding into the Group Data Policy and Data Quality standards as key Data Quality SMEs as well as producing detailed guidance handbooks and training.

In 2023, Kiran became the Group Head of Data Management Engagement which is a new team focusing on providing support and guidance to the Group to empower them to manage their data excellently, generate metrics and reports, triage queries, and other non-change related activities. Her team has grown at pace over the last couple of months as they continue to be responsible for reporting material & severe Data Quality issues impacting the Group to the board. All Data Management BAU activities and support for the group now channel through Kiran’s new team.

Prior to joining Lloyds Banking Group, Kiran was a Senior Manager in the Data & Analytics team within the Financial Services Technology Consulting practice at EY. Here she leads major Data Quality change projects, data remediation and assurance programmes for a number of Financial Service clients including major Banks and Insurers.

Throughout the last 10+ years, Kiran has been an Inclusion and Diversity champion and has successfully led multiple forums and working groups, including setting up the Women in Data network in the Data & Analytics team at EY. Kiran is also a mentor both formally and informally to number of women in data and technology roles as well as advocating and supporting the next generation of talent into data roles through various school/colleague/graduate schemes.

Social Media Details: LinkedIn

Expertise:

Alice is a Chapter Lead in the Chief Data & Analytics Office at Lloyds Banking Group (LBG). She leads 3 large programmes of work including: the group’s data science lifecycle, the group’s model inventory & risk management tool & the ethical ai toolkit. Her mission is to ensure responsible, safe & ethical delivery of models in the bank, to protect customers and colleagues. Over the past few years, her team has grown significantly, and she now leads Product Owners, data scientists, data engineers, scrum masters and business analysts. She is passionate about her work and has presented at various forums and conferences on the importance of responsible machine learning & AI.

Her background is in consulting & data mining/statistics (MSc in Marketing & Business Analysis from the University of Edinburgh) with 10 years’ experience, including 4 at Lloyds.

Outside her day-to-day role, she is involved in a number of activities close to her heart: she is the steerco lead for the Women in Data LBG working group and has been a judge for the Women in Tech Excellence Awards for the past 3 years. Alice is also a bit advocate for mentoring, and for wider recognition of women. She has been a member of LBG’s internal Women ConnecTech network from the start, supporting & leading various tech events & initiatives and has also appeared in panels about supporting the growth of women in tech.

Education:

  • Data Ethics Professional – Open Data Institute
  • MSc in Marketing & Business Analysis – University of Edinburgh, Business School (UK)
  • BBA (Business) – ESSEC (France) & UNSW (Australia)

Social Media Details: LinkedIn

Expertise:

Leena joined the bank in 2020 as Head of engineering in the Digital platform. She is passionate about building high-performing cross-functional teams and championing engineering practices to deliver customer value at pace and enable innovation.

Prior to joining Lloyds, Leena moved to London in 2008 to work with Trainline where she spent a decade and her love for data-driven product development grew and put customers at heart. She is born and brought up in India which shaped her character to challenge the status quo and keep pushing the bar to continuously improve

Since she joined Lloyds, she has been on a transformative journey to help adopt the cloud to modernise our application estate as well as infra to build with resilience, security and auto-scaling in mind.

Last year she took the role of Platform Technology Lead to drive a personalised experience and communication platform. In her words “This is a niche area where we have a real opportunity to make a difference to our customers by understanding their needs as data points and use data to personalise customer interactions at the individual level and communicate when it matters in the moment.

To deliver this group ambition across all our customer segments, it’s important we create an ecosystem where customer data is organised into domains and governed in a decentralized way to keep it safe, secure and self-serve.”

 

Social Media Details: LinkedIn

Expertise:

Alex has 30 years working across Manufacturing, Banking and Finance services. Originally qualifying in Finance as her main profession, she has since gained qualification in multiple change disciples, Six Sigma and Data capabilities.  Alex did not go to university but into work at 16 on YTS (apprenticeship) which set the scene on working with Customers and understanding how Finance and Data were at the heart of Commercial operations.

After learning the ropes in Manufacturing industries, Alex moved to MBNA credit card in 2001, where she held several leadership roles across the finance function but found her passion for change and data activities during 2 key projects. The first was to offshore Finance reporting activities to India and second whilst developing the Resolution and Recovery plan post 2008 Credit Crunch, both projects required a detailed understanding of how data flowed through Technology and then how it was used throughout the Organisation.

Alex moved to Lloyds Banking Group in 2012, where she has held several leadership positions across Finance supporting the Cost & Investment management teams before moving into Group Change function. During this time, the function was transforming to scale agile methodology across the group and to renew how this change was monitored. As part of this transformation Alex led teams that managed the operations behind the change, transformed the data that underpinned the change activity and revitalised an underused Tableau reporting tool (“Nerve Centre”) as the go to repository for the Groups change programme reporting meaning teams access real time reporting removing the need for localised data.

Alex’s is now LLoyds Banking Group’s Director of Finance Data & Analytics Office, where she is leading a team of 300+ Data colleagues to deliver a significant transformation across Finance to produce useful insight enabling data driven decision making at all levels across the division. She has responsibility for all Data activity across Finance function encompassing all key data related disciplines such as Strategy, Governance, Data Management, Data Quality, Metadata, and Data Design & Development, all of which underpin the reporting and BI needs for the Finance.

As a working mum with dyslexia Alex is passionate about supporting women across Finance and Data to champion diversity of thought.