Lloyds Banking Group has become the latest UK high street bank to launch a mentoring service for fintech startups.
Lloyds mentoring scheme will be based on collaborations with fintech accelerators Innovate Finance and Startupbootcamp, both of which will help the bank to identify suitable candidates.
Marc Lien, Lloyds director of Innovation and Digital Development, believes the scheme will be mutually beneficial. "We can also learn lessons from fintech firms' successes and failures that will help shape and inform our digitisation journey."
Lloyds has embarked on similar initiatives in the recent past, providing both a range of experts and floor space to savings app Swave, a winner of the Innovate UK Financial Literacy Challenge. Other UK banks such as Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland have also sought to work with the startup scene.
The launch of the mentoring scheme follows a difficult few weeks for Lloyds. At the end of June the bank announced a series of branch closures and job cuts. And just last week the bank's online banking service suffered intermittent outages.
Lloyds was then hit with another scandal when a whistleblower alleged that bank staff have been mis-selling fee-based, packaged bank accounts from as far back as 2012.
The whistleblower, speaking to UK tabloid the Mail on Sunday, alleges that staff were bullied and threatened if they failed to hit their sales targets and that vulnerable, financial illiterate customers were targeted in tactics he described as 'shocking and monstrous'.