At this year’s PAY360 conference held at London’s Excel – one of the largest payment events of the year in the UK – more than 5,000 payment and finance professionals from around the globe gathered to network and share insights on the hot topics in the industry.
The Fintech Times took the opportunity to catch up with Lloyds Bank and fast-growing fintech CoBa Technology – a cloud-hosted platform that seamlessly connects banks and businesses – to learn more about their recent collaboration.
Robin Scher, head of fintech investment at Lloyds Banking Group and Tom Stoddart, head of market sales at Lloyds Banking Group, were joined by Carl Hasty, CEO and co-founder of CoBa, to discuss their partnership as well as how they are collaborating to enable clients to digitally manage their banking needs through automation and workflow connections.
Investing in startups
According to Scher, Lloyd’s created a £50million fund internally to invest in early-stage fintech startups in order to “reduce the cost of change or increase the pace of change”.
He explained why that included CoBa: “One of the things we look for and we absolutely love is great founders with real vision and an ability to execute. We look at the product-market fit as well, something that we think is going to work in the market. We also invest in things that we are going to learn from, that will innovate with us and partner with us in a true partnership fashion.”
In agreement, Stoddart added: “We look for an aligned philosophy particularly with the purpose that we have as an organisation. An alignment over goals of what looks good from a execution and delivery perspective is absolutely critical.
“What we have found by working with CoBa is that as a large organisation with multiple data sources we can bring that together and hand it to CoBa who are much more nimble and agile in terms of the way that they can deliver solutions for our customers.”
Hasty also added: “We focus on strategic relationships and want to work with a bank right at its core. We’re very much about bringing the bank and the client together.”
To find out more about their collaboration and how the strategic partnership plans to co-create tailored solutions for clients., watch our interview below.