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Heidi Peterson, of Lloyds Bank International, tells Emily Moore how the organisation has enhanced its service for commercial clients
WHEN Heraclitus said that “change is the only constant in life”, the ancient Greek could not have imagined that, thousands of years later, his philosophy would resonate with business leaders across the world.
But, as Lloyds Bank International’s director of financial institutions Heidi Peterson explains as she reflects on the bank’s new offer for commercial clients, “change will never end”.
“We have achieved a huge amount in the past couple of years since Andy Corbett was appointed to lead Lloyds Commercial in the islands and given the mandate of modernising and re-energising the way we support our commercial clients,” said Heidi. “Under his leadership, the group has invested millions of pounds in new technology and key skills to enable us to deliver a personal and efficient service to our corporate services clients particularly.”
Having joined the bank 18 months ago, Heidi is responsible for leading the teams interacting with those clients and, as she says, the service offered now is completely different from that which was available a few years ago.
“It has been a challenging process to get to this point,” she reflected. “While the new cash management and payments platform Lloyds Bank Gem® has been a big part of that transformation, you cannot underestimate the degree of change management that had to take place to enable us to launch it. As a leadership team, we had to learn how best to manage this change and have had some very honest discussions with both clients and stakeholders as part of that process.
“We had to prepare ourselves to be quite vulnerable, as that very honest feedback was essential to ensure that both our teams and clients came with us. We’ve realised that sometimes something cannot be done in a certain way and so we’ve had to work collectively to develop solutions which work for everybody.”
While those solutions may now be in place, Heidi is under no illusions that “the job is done”.
“Clients’ needs will always change and group strategies will differ, so we will always need to keep driving ourselves,” she said. “We can never sit back and say ‘this is business as usual’ because our clients will never be saying that. Core to our success, therefore, is a culture in which change and agility is constant.”
Being in an offshore centre, serving clients in Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, Heidi said that the growth in trust, funds and captive insurance business had prompted the bank’s investment in this sector.
“We needed to ensure services providers know that we are open for business,” she explained. “While we’ve served the Channel Islands for more than 200 years, we have, to a degree, hidden our light under a bushel. Thanks to Gem®, we’re now in a position to shine that light more brightly in the communities we serve.”
And for those communities, the funds industry is, says Heidi, particularly important, with a growing number of structures being set up in both Jersey and Guernsey.
‘In the past, Lloyds hasn’t got too involved in providing services focused on funds, so part of the recent investment has gone into boosting the team’s skills in this sector and making sure that they understand not just the different types of funds but also the risks associated with them and how we can mitigate those so that we give clients the service they need,” she said.
“Critically, from our conversations with clients, we have realised that while an efficient technological platform is essential, just as important are the relationships. At a time when some of our peers in the market are moving away from a relationship-led approach and automating or offshoring more processes, we’ve invested more heavily in our people, increasing our teams to ensure that we can provide local support.”
With around 60 people currently in the commercial team, Heidi said that the bank was recruiting even more people across the islands over the next 12 months to ensure that “as we bring on more clients and service more and more funds, our service levels remain high”.
This approach, she adds, responds directly to the three factors which clients said were most important.
“Our clients told us that they want a good technology interface with the bank, a quick and efficient onboarding process for their new clients and a strong relationship with the bank, so that they could pick up the phone and have a conversation with someone who understands their business,” she said. “In a competitive market, these elements are key in enhancing the service they can offer to their clients and reducing the costs involved.”
Satisfying these criteria, Heidi says, comes back to talking to clients and then acting on the findings of those conversations.
“We don’t pretend to be perfect,” she said with refreshing honesty, “but we are always transparent with our clients. We continue to hold panels where we ask clients what we’re doing right and what we’re getting wrong, and we don’t shy away from clients who we know will be frank. Those conversations have given us an invaluable insight into what matters to them and has shaped our investment approach.”
One area on which the team has focused is risk.
“While growing the business safely remains one of our key tenets, we have changed our approach to risk,” Heidi explained. “In the past, if we were uncomfortable with something because we didn’t understand it, the tendency would have been to just decline the business.
“Now, with our new commitment to understanding the risk, we will spend more time talking to our clients – who, after all, abide by the same handbook and regulations as us – to understand how they have become comfortable with that risk. That greater level of information can help us to look at the situation differently and, in many cases, has enabled us to partner with clients in ways that we may not have done two years ago.”
And this relationship-based approach, coupled with the “state-of-the-art, best-practice technology platform” has, Heidi believes, “brought Lloyds to the party”.
“Before launching Gem® there is no doubt that our competitors had better technical solutions than we did,” she admitted. “Now, though, it is a different matter. Gem® has aligned us with our peers and our relationship teams and onboarding effectiveness give us a unique selling point, which is difficult for our competitors to replicate.
“Finding people and deploying them correctly is very tricky, especially in the islands, and it is also very nuanced as each island has its own differences. But I would say that what has historically been one of our biggest challenges has now become our biggest USP.”
And while admitting that the past 18 months have been “a real rollercoaster ride”, Heidi is confident that Lloyds is now in a strong position to consolidate its standing in the market and grow in a sustainable way.
“While we don’t expect to be all things to all commercial clients in the islands, we want to grow our people and products to ensure that they are fit for the communities in which we are based,” she said. “To do this, we need to remain relevant, something we will achieve by staying close to our clients and being led by their needs.
“Our people are our USP. We have great teams and we’re building fantastic relationships with our clients. If we continue to get that right, the rest will come together and there is a tremendous passion and excitement across the islands about the service we can offer. At the end of the day, it certainly doesn’t hurt that, along with the hard work, we are having a lot of fun.”
