You can't hold black horse down: Brit bank Lloyds goes full multi-cloud, signs up with Google as well as Microsoft

Spirited equine gambols from vendor to vendor

UK finance giant Lloyds Banking Group is to slice off a portion of its £3bn digital transformation investment and feed it to Google as part of a five-year agreement.

The deal will see the banking group using Mountain View's engineering and AI smarts to craft "more personalised customer experiences".

A Lloyds spokesperson told The Register that the group intended to use Google's Anthos as part of a drive to modernise app development and Apigee "to manage the bank's application programming interfaces (APIs) to support Open Banking initiatives".

Anthos is Google's take on the thorny issue of what can head cloudwards and what needs to stay very much on premises, an important consideration in a highly regulated industry such as banking. Anthos GKE will deal with Kubernetes clusters while Anthos Services Mesh handles the microservices architecture. Apigee is the firm Google acquired in late 2016 and forms the spine of its tilt at a cross-cloud API management platform.

The whole "cross-cloud" thing is key as the bank declared: "The collaboration is part of the Group's technology strategy that will build on its multi-cloud approach."

Indeed it will. One could almost see the "distracted boyfriend" memes popping up over in Redmond. It was, after all, only in January that Microsoft and Lloyds were forming a "partnership to accelerate bank's digital transformation strategy."

Also as part of that £3bn investment, the bank will spank cash on the Microsoft Managed Desktop, replete with Office 365 and Windows 10. The bank also has plans to use Microsoft Azure to "provide a more enhanced customer offering".

Lloyds is clearly not kidding about the multi-cloud thing, although the spokesperson did tell us: "We are at the very early stage of our partnership and will work with Google to assess key opportunities."

We can but hope those "opportunities" include dealing with the mystery Y2.02K problem that befell some of its services earlier this year or the glitch that afflicted the, at the time, inappropriately named "Faster Payments" service in 2019.

The Register asked Google's cloudy rival, Microsoft, for its thoughts on the deal, but the company had nothing to share. ®