Lloyds Banking Group partnered with Unleash to move from slow, monolithic releases to independent deployments, empowering 1,000+ users across 20 platforms to deliver features faster and safer to 23 million customers.
FeatureOps enabled Lloyds to federate ownership to product teams, allowing them to deploy independently without waiting for monolithic releases every 3-4 weeks.
Unleash's compliance workflows allowed Lloyds to maintain strict regulatory controls while accelerating release cycles by 35%.
FeatureOps provides the foundation for AI initiatives and A/B testing, enabling Lloyds to continue its 400-year legacy of innovation in UK banking.
"As a 400-year-old financial institution and an innovation leader in the UK, we care about governance and control, as well as speed. The Unleash FeatureOps platform ensures we have the right compliance and governance in place while still delivering at the pace our customers demand."
Daniel Woollery
Head of Digital Services, Lloyds Banking Group
Lloyds Banking Group is one of the UK’s largest and most established financial institutions, with a history spanning over 400 years. Founded in 1695, the organization has been at the forefront of banking innovation in the UK, achieving numerous “firsts” including:
Today, Lloyds Banking Group serves more than 23 million digitally active customers across 16 brands, anchored by its three core retail names, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax.
The bank has made significant investments in technology modernization, with 50% of applications transitioned to cloud, 90% accessed through mobile apps, and a 35% improvement in release times through agile practices, significantly enhanced by their partnership with Unleash.
Lloyds faced a critical challenge with their monolithic codebase that limited digital delivery across the entire organization. The centralized architecture created a bottleneck affecting all digital services across their 16 brands. While releases improved from every six months to every 3-4 weeks, the pace was still too slow to compete in modern digital banking.
Product owners and customer experience teams had no independent control over their features, dependent on centralized teams with exclusive access to the monolithic codebase. Teams were forced to wait for release windows even when a new capability was ready to deploy. If one feature had a defect, all changes rolled back together, impacting unrelated teams.
As a highly regulated institution, Lloyds needed to maintain strict governance and compliance controls. The challenge was accelerating delivery without compromising security, audit trails, and regulatory requirements. Traditional approaches suggested faster releases meant cutting corners on governance, unacceptable for a bank serving millions of customers.
The rigid release schedule made experimentation difficult. Missing a release window meant waiting another 3-4 weeks. This culture of caution stifled innovation and prevented teams from testing different approaches or trying new features with specific customer segments.
In 2023, Lloyds reached a critical tipping point. After pushing their monolithic release cycle to its limit (3-4 weeks), they couldn’t go faster with existing architecture. Competitors were releasing more frequently, and to maintain their leadership position in UK banking, they needed to transform their delivery model.
As Lloyds transitioned applications to the cloud (GCP and Azure), they needed to replace their existing feature flag system. After extensive evaluation, they selected Unleash as their strategic FeatureOps partner.
Unleash offered a straightforward, intuitive user interface that was easy to adopt across teams. The platform’s design made feature management accessible to product owners, engineers, and DevOps teams without requiring extensive training or technical overhead.
Unleash’s compliance controls and approval workflows addressed Lloyds’ core concern: maintaining strict regulatory requirements while accelerating delivery. Unlike their previous system, Unleash didn’t force a choice between speed and governance. Workflows were faster and more efficient while maintaining required control and audit trails, satisfying auditors while enabling developers to move faster.
Beyond basic feature flags, Unleash offered the advanced capabilities Lloyd
s needed: independent delivery and testing, gradual rollouts, easy rollback mechanisms, demographic-based targeting, and A/B testing. The intuitive interface made feature management accessible without extensive training.
Unleash engaged directly with Lloyds’ central DevOps organization to understand their unique mix of legacy systems and modern cloud infrastructure. This collaborative approach ensured the solution would work across their entire estate, from COBOL mainframes to AI-enabled microservices, while providing the foundation for AI experimentation and continuous innovation across 600+ customer journeys.
The partnership with Unleash enabled Lloyds to fundamentally restructure how they deliver software. Product teams now have end-to-end autonomy to deploy features independently, without waiting for the monolithic release cycle. Over 1,000 users across 20 platforms now use FeatureOps to manage features for their specific customer journeys.
FeatureOps transformed Lloyds’ engineering culture beyond technical capabilities, enabling experimentation without fear of missing release windows, fail-fast iteration, collaborative practices with shared tooling, and confidence to innovate for customers.
Accelerating delivery while maintaining governance was critical. Unleash demonstrated both were achievable, keeping necessary compliance controls in place while making approval workflows faster, automating change tracking and audit trails, and satisfying auditors while improving developer experience.
Through agile practices enabled by FeatureOps, Lloyds achieved a 35% improvement in release times. Teams no longer waited for monolithic release windows, rollbacks were instant and targeted, testing happened independently, and features could be validated in production with gradual rollouts.
With proper governance guardrails, developers and engineers now have direct control over feature release, eliminating frustration of waiting for deployment slots and reducing dependencies on central teams. To further drive a culture of innovation, Lloyds is planning to adopt advanced capabilities including A/B testing, demographic targeting, AI experimentation, and sophisticated rollout strategies.
FeatureOps has become a strategic capability at Lloyds, <strong>enabling a fundamental shift from centralized, slow releases to federated, fast delivery. With over 600 customer journeys across three main banking brands now deploying independently, the impact on business agility has been substantial.
Customers receive functionality much faster than before. Prior to FeatureOps, customers felt they weren’t getting features as quickly as competitors. That perception has changed dramatically, as teams now deliver value continuously rather than waiting weeks for release windows.
By breaking through the 3-4 week release ceiling, Lloyds has restored its position as a leader in digital banking innovation. 50% of applications have successfully transitioned to cloud platforms, with <strong>FeatureOps enabling this transformation and supporting the gradual retirement of legacy systems.
The platform serves as the foundation for Lloyds’ AI strategy</strong>, enabling safe experimentation of AI-driven features in controlled environments and managing AI model rollouts before production deployment at scale.
Since partnering with Unleash three years ago, the measurable impact has been substantial: 1,000+ users actively utilize FeatureOps across 20 platforms, with 600+ journeys benefiting from independent deployments.
The organization achieved a 35% improvement in release times, successfully migrated 50% of applications to cloud, and now handles 90% of customer interactions through mobile apps. All enabled by faster, safer feature delivery.
Looking ahead, Lloyds plans to continue cloud migration with FeatureOps support, experiment with advanced capabilities like A/B testing, and further improve release times and developer productivity while retiring legacy systems.
For Lloyds Banking Group, the partnership with Unleash has been transformational. What began as a search for a better feature flag system evolved into a strategic capability that fundamentally changed how the organization delivers software.
FeatureOps solved the technical challenge of the monolithic bottleneck while enabling cultural change, restoring competitive advantage, and laying the foundation for future innovation in AI and beyond.
The success demonstrates that even organizations with 400 years of history and strict regulatory requirements can achieve modern software delivery velocity without compromising on governance, security, or customer trust.
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“In the beginning, I thought working with Unleash was just going to be about feature flags. But I was very wrong. The Unleash FeatureOps platform has enabled our teams to work more collaboratively, be more experimental, and not be afraid to try new things to deliver the right things for our customers.”
Daniel Woollery
Head of Digital Services, Lloyds Banking Group
