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Lloyds Banking Group is planning to increase lending to big corporate clients and expand its services to financial institutions, signalling a shake-up for the retail banking giant that could see it grow internationally.
The UK’s biggest high street bank will make expanding its corporate and institutional banking business, or CIB, a key part of chief executive Charlie Nunn’s next strategic update over the summer, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The push will mean growing the bank’s small US office and other international outposts to better cater for multinational British clients that may need cross-border services, one of the people added.
Expanding parts of the bank beyond its core offering is a step change for Lloyds, whose current strategy has focused on doubling down on its retail business and diversifying to manage customer pensions, investments and insurance.
The CIB serves large corporate clients, multinational asset managers, private equity sponsors and other large financial institutions. It provides these clients with services including debt capital markets, structured finance, foreign exchange hedging and acquisition financing.
Lloyds has about 3,000 CIB clients, each with a minimum of £100mn in turnover.
The bank views the division as a key driver of growth, according to the people briefed on the matter. Its plans to grow the business include not only providing more client services but also expanding the scale of existing ones, they added. Nunn is due to unveil his strategy in July.
Lloyds will not grow internationally at scale, nor will it try to compete with US banks, cautioned one person familiar with the matter.
Lloyds has already started quietly growing its CIB under Nunn. In 2025, it grew 7 per cent, while its business and commercial banking division, which serves smaller clients, shrank 5 per cent. Since 2022, CIB revenues for Lloyds have grown 35 per cent and in 2025 Lloyds CIB lent about £62.5bn to clients, compared with the group’s total loans of £481.1bn.
Lloyds has also started hiring in its CIB divisions to grow its financial services business, according to one job advert. The bank also announced in November that it would appoint John Langley, the head of CIB at Wells Fargo, to lead its CIB.
However, the lender will not make forays into capital-intensive banking, such as equities and fixed-income trading, according to one person briefed on the matter. Instead it will be using debt, forex and rates as the main focus.
Another added that while Lloyds is keen to boost its CIB, the lender would always remain predominantly a retail bank.
The CIB sits outside Lloyds’ ringfence, the post-crisis division that separates large UK lenders’ retail banking units from other operations. Regulators are examining ways to loosen ringfence rules, which prevent banks using money from British retail depositors to fund riskier activities.
Lloyds declined to comment.
The bank is in the last throes of a plan launched in 2022 by Nunn to increase the amount of income generated from sources that are less closely tied to the interest rate cycle than its traditional lending business.
The diversification was part of a major growth push for Lloyds, the first after years of retrenchment in the wake of the financial crisis and the lender’s taxpayer bailout. The bank returned to private ownership in 2017.
Since that push in February 2022, Lloyds’ share price has increased 113 per cent. Its most recent results show that Lloyds’ “other income” — which includes its fees from pensions, insurance and wealth — increased 9 per cent to £6.1bn.
Meanwhile, its “interest income” rose 6 per cent to £13.6bn. In 2025, fee income, which is not interest rate sensitive, accounted for about a third of Lloyds’ revenues. By contrast, NatWest’s 2024 results showed the bank generated about 23 per cent of its income through non-interest income.
Under the diversification push, Lloyds has also quietly built up one of the UK’s largest residential property portfolios, valued at more than £2bn. It also has a private equity business, called LDC, which has almost £2.3bn of assets under management.