Hi, Charlie. It's great to be here to talk to you about Half Year Results. We're at a really important  point in our strategic plan. How do you think it's going in  terms of the transformation?

We announced a robust financial  performance for the first six months of 2024. We're delivering in line with our expectations, and we're feeling really good about the overall strategic transformation. We're about halfway through our five year strategy, and the next two and a half years are the really important part for the Group.

Grow Focus Change

We talked about our strategy in three  buckets - Grow, Focus and Change. Grow was about really focusing back on our customers, differentiating our services, proving that we could  bring the whole value of Lloyds Banking Group to our customers across all of our business units.

And we've got great examples where we are growing market share. We committed to about 1.5 billion of new revenue growth by 2026, and we're on track for that.

The Focus part was about making sure we do that in the right way, and there's lots of brilliant examples around how we're providing servicing to clients and using digital and technology to automate how we serve clients.

And then the third part of the strategy was around Change, enabling new capabilities, technologies and data to serve customers in a more efficient way, and then to start to innovate and use some of the new technologies like generative AI, and cloud services, to move the organisation at greater pace.

Mass Affluent

Now, you're leading one of the most important strategic initiatives in our Mass Affluent area. So it’d be great to hear your reflections on the first two years of the strategy as well.

Mass Affluent, as you know, is customers who've got £75,000 income or investable assets. And when we started the strategy, we had over 2 million of these customers, and their needs are complex and they're diverse because this customer segment spans across life stages, whether it's, you know, getting into your first home, whether you're thinking about planning for retirement or you’re at retirement. So this isn't a one size fits all.

And what we set out to do was to build a digitally-led, highly personalised service for customers, but then with a human touch.

We launched Lloyds Bank 360 back in September of last year. We started really small, just 50,000 customers. In a way, they've been helping us to create this because we see the bits that they like, that they don't like, and we iterate as we start to scale this up. So we've now got over half a million customers using  the Lloyds Bank 360 experience.

Insurance, Pensions and Investments

We've done huge amounts with the IP&I business as well, more recently leading to the launch of our Ready Made products, really simple investments and pension products to help people get started on that journey, so some really good progress.

New digital opportunities

But where do you see the opportunities, and are we getting there fast enough?

We have the leading digital bank in the UK. We have over 19 million customers now actively logging on to our apps, 22 million logging on digitally. 6 billion log-ons a year. That's a huge opportunity for us to engage customers and drive depth of relationship.

Your Credit Score was a new experience we launched in our app and now over 10 million customers are engaging with that service, and that means they can borrow safely and borrow more effectively.

We've done over £38 billion worth of lending to core customers around sustainable transitions. The eight biggest universities last year that we're looking for new cash management solutions, chose Lloyds Banking Group as their partner.

We launched a really simple investment product in the last few years  for 18 to 25 year olds, and we doubled the number of customers we had in that segment. The IP&I business has also been launching a whole set of new services to really engage customers and help them take choices and build greater financial resilience for the future. We're back to number one in home insurance. And of course, our workplace pensions And, is such an important growth engine for our IP&I business.

So, growth opportunities across the business. The real theme is about leveraging our brilliant people, our technology and ways of working and doing it at pace to make a difference for our customers.