As Business Platform Lead for Economic Crime Prevention at Lloyds Banking Group, Tom Martin’s role runs the gamut from fraud prevention and detection, financial crimes investigations and risk management through to IT strategy, business transformation, cloud computing and product management. Having first joined what was then Lloyds TSB in 2007, over the next decade Tom held a series of leadership roles within Lloyds including Business Risk & Change, UK Wealth Proposition, and Multi-Channel Strategy. After 18 months as Head of the Group’s Contact Centre in Glasgow, he spent three years at Halifax as Head of Business Performance and then Regional Director. Tom returned to Lloyds in the summer of 2019, initially taking on the roles of Remote Mortgage Director and then Retail Relationship Director for Insurance, Protection & Wealth.

Paul Riseborough: Tom, welcome. Looking over your career these past two decades, it is clear that the roles you’ve held have been close to the customer, which must be helpful given what you are doing today. It could be all too easy as a business platform lead to simply focus on business objectives and how you deliver them through various technologies, and be rather divorced from the end customer you're serving. 

Tom Martin: Without a doubt and it’s something I’m extremely aware of, especially in such a large bank like Lloyds Banking Group. I do think as an organisation we are becoming even-more customer obsessed – and when we do that, we deliver innovation and value at speed. But it’s also part of my role to make sure our engineers are as close to customer needs as our frontline colleagues are.  

The common thread through my career is always wanting to leave your part of the business in a better place than when you found it. That is a key mantra of mine. Modernization and transformation have been cornerstones of every role that I've held. Running a platform is just my dream job, because it’s about engaging in the economic crime prevention fight at the biggest possible scale – and you really feel like you’re doing good for the customer every day.

Paul Riseborough: For the uninitiated, what does it mean to be a business platform lead? Lloyds Banking Group has been through a big transformation and numerous iterations to establish your platform-based model. Can you give an insight into being part of that operating model transition? While these changes might sound abstract, on a day to day basis they really impact customers’ lives and also how colleagues come together as a team around a set of goals.

Tom Martin:  Absolutely. Lloyds’ ambition is to be the biggest and best financial technology company. For context, a few years ago we were a transformation division of around 20,000 people. We were split into different value streams, but we weren’t agile enough. We weren’t modernizing as quickly as we might have. 

We've now effectively split ourselves into some 40 platforms. It’s a ‘two in the box’ model – for my economic crime prevention platforms I've got about 600 people, and we’re set up as our own mini business. We’ve got our own autonomous, enduring funding. There are still Group guardrails and I have a set of outcomes that I need to deliver for all business stakeholders. But I have real autonomy on how we work and how we deliver those outcomes. 

We’re on a journey. Two or three years ago we had what we called Platform 1.0, then a year ago we moved to Platform 2.0, and it won't be long before we announce our next iteration. We are continually evolving. 

Paul Riseborough: I’m interested in how you have led through that transition. It strikes me – and I've experienced this myself –  that while there’s a lot more freedom, that comes with new accountabilities. That requires a cultural transformation as much as an operational and technological shift.

Tom Martin: It has been a key shift in mindset and approach across the teams. Our strong and clear purpose of preventing harm and the impact of fraud and financial crime across the world has been core in framing and driving that shift. 

There’s also a range of agile techniques that we're using that are consistently embedded across the wider Group. We will have sessions every quarter, ‘big room’ planning that lasts at least a day and gets all the business stakeholders and the engineers aligned on what we’re going to do for next quarter. The ability to work through the right tooling is also definitely helping us go faster. We use Jira Align much more consistently to view the tickets that are being worked on that week, and how we can unblock any issues. I personally get involved in those tickets to ensure we can unblock at pace. 

Paul Riseborough: If we just take a step back, you've talked about a set of principles, a mission of sorts. What are the priorities when it comes to achieving positive outcomes for customers? One of the interesting developments we’re seeing across a number of our own clients is that investment and focus have shifted away from just having a great mobile app and digital acquisition journeys, and generally knitting together the front end channels correctly. Now we’re seeing the focus on the customer experience move into the middle and back office, areas that have been somewhat neglected historically. You seem to have high ambitions to bring the same level of thinking around customer experience transformation to those types of journeys and moments of truth.

Tom Martin: We’ve certainly invested heavily in our mobile app in recent years, adding features such as Link Pay – we are taking it to the next level. An example is supporting customers with disputed transactions. If the customer sees a transaction they don't recognize, they used to have to call us. Now, thanks to some behind the scenes technology and app functionality, they can get instant decisions and get the money back within minutes.

This summer we also launched what we believe is the UK’s first debit card straight through reporting journey, again through the mobile app. This is very worrying for the customer – £10 can quickly become £1,000, and we’ve listened to calls with customers where they are watching the money disappearing from their account literally in front of their eyes. So it’s really important that we can very quickly freeze their debit card if needed, reissue a new one, get the customer’s money back, and leave them knowing everything is safe and secure. That for me really gets to the heart of what a lot of banking is about – and we're enabling that straight through the app, instantly. Over recent months we have seen half a million people start that debit card fraud reporting journey.

Paul Riseborough: It may seem obvious, but it is so worth restating how important it is to design experiences that align with how customers actually behave and use things.

Tom Martin: Yes, and in the weeks since we've launched that new journey we've undertaken eight different sprints to add features and make tweaks to optimize the user experience. Ultimately, we are sparing customers hours of worry – and we are also saving tens of millions of pounds in operational costs and processing time.

Paul Riseborough: As little as five or six years ago, the focus for teams dealing with this kind of service demand was about how you do it efficiently, how the cost to service a high volume of cases could be reduced. But the focus of the platform model now seems squarely on value to the customer.

Tom Martin: It’s certainly much more multi-dimensional than it ever has been. It’s great to have a slick reporting journey that can solve issues quickly for customers, but we’re increasingly applying machine learning and using our data more intelligently at the front end. Only a few years ago, with our debit card prevention strategies, we’d have to block 20 genuine transactions to stop one fraud transaction. Now we’re in a position, thanks to machine learning data and AI, where we're stopping less than 10 genuine transactions to access the fraudulent one – and that is getting better every day.

Paul Riseborough: So you're personalizing that protection to some degree, with less collateral damage when you protect a customer – which is a real game changer in the overall experience.

Tom Martin: Exactly. While customers won’t be aware of it, the way I think about it is that we’re effectively putting a force field around their finances and bank account. We have multiple PhD qualified data scientists  and machine learning experts – some of the brightest, most capable people I’ve ever known – who are using all their brainpower to organize the terabytes of data we hold in a really powerful way to fight fraud. The fraudsters are very agile and don't have to play by the rules. But I've got real faith that we'll win that race thanks to the investments we’re making and the capabilities we’ve built.

Paul Riseborough: When you think about designing a new service or customer experience, how do you muster your team and generally organize internally around it? What are the mechanics of going from ‘could we do that’ to going live with the solution or service?

Tom Martin: There’s a couple of things we need to come together. One is definitely a truly compelling case for change. We have thousands of people that are helping customers every day, where we're dealing with fraud claims, which is really difficult emotionally. There are definitely times where you can’t automate that, and it’s really important that we speak directly to a customer at various stages in that journey. The last thing our people want is to let down that customer. We’re only human, and if a customer is in real difficulty, everybody wants to help them. So that is a really powerful case for change.

Also, when it comes to the latest technology – particularly AI and machine learning, where we’ve got some great use cases in the pipeline – there’s a real pull there. Our engineers want to use the latest technology. They want to build careers and skills and experiences, and feel like they’re working with the best tools that are going to drive innovation into the market. That is another powerful case for change.

Paul Riseborough: Absolutely. People want to work on consequential things, because ultimately that’s why we all get out of bed in the morning. Also the ability to design the experience to create something that's really usable.

Tom Martin: One of the key changes that we've made as part of our platform evolution is to create customer journey managers. We give them the accountability, ownership and tools to really feel that this is a specific customer journey that that they really own. They understand the continuous improvement type tweaks they can make to that journey – and are empowered to make them. So it’s a way of working and thinking that is less pure channel focused but more customer journey focused.

Paul Riseborough: You've talked about the evolving and dynamic nature of fraudsters and economic crime. It's a hugely challenging threat landscape, so what do you see as the key focus areas down the line?

Tom Martin:  Approximately forty per cent of crime in the UK is fraud. That's a shocking figure, and means we are all potentially victims of fraud at some point. Over two-thirds of fraud starts in the social media space. It is a great test bed for fraudsters because there are millions of users, and they only need to catch out a relative handful of people.

Clearly the regulators are taking an ever greater interest, notably with the Payment Systems Regulator looking to ensure victims of APP scams are quickly reimbursed. On our side, we are thinking constantly about how we evolve. We've got to be responsive and proactive in how we evolve our controls – on an almost hourly basis – be it in terms of how fraud is manifesting, or how we can best issue warnings to seize customers’ attention or change their behaviour or alert them to social engineering.

At the same time we’ve got to think about how financial crime is evolving. The world is unfortunately more unstable than ever, and that means more individuals are being sanctioned. So we’ve got to make sure that money isn't going to places it shouldn’t, and that all our checks and balances are working as effectively as possible. In many respects those are real big data challenges, and we've got to apply the best technology, the best of data science and machine learning, to cut off funding that ultimately goes to these very real harms. 

Paul Riseborough: The paradox is you spend most of your time making the customer experience easier when it comes to accessing and moving money – but making things easier can also make things less secure. Safety invariably adds grit or friction into the customer journey. How do you strike the right balance , particularly when some of your competitors aren't regulated in the same way as banks are?

Tom Martin: It is a constant learning exercise but keeping our customers safe and secure remains priority zero. We’ve got to maintain that mindset of continually testing, learning and really understanding journeys from multiple dimensions. When some customers are being socially engineered, they're under a spell – there is often a high degree of emotional pressure associated with it. 

For example, your 18-year-old son or daughter is travelling somewhere in the world, and you suddenly get a message saying they’ve lost their debit of credit card and need money urgently. In that moment of sudden emotional stress you can be caught out, particularly if you’re busy or distracted. So how do you break that spell? We've learned a lot and are relatively successful at doing that – but the scams are continually evolving, and we've got to keep learning to stay ahead.

Paul Riseborough: Looking ahead, what do you see as the next three or four big shifts for your platform, or indeed around economic crime and fraud more generally? What do you think is going to define the next 10 years for your platform? 

Tom Martin: AI is top of the list, no question. The impact it is going to have is not just an incremental change. It will be a fundamental design shift. I’ve talked about some of the positive changes that we've seen through our machine learning, such as doubling the performance. But those type of scaled changes are the tip of the iceberg. I can see lots of opportunity there, and we are getting ourselves really well organized for that and starting to get the deliveries on the runway. Those will become more visible to customers and the industry soon.