Interview: Lloyds Banking Group and Publicis Sapient, UK IT Industry Awards finalist

'The key opportunities lie in using cloud and AI to transform and personalise at scale’

We’ve talked to Sneha Murdeshwar of Lloyds Banking Group, to find out more about the company's moves that helped it reach the finals of the UK IT Industry Awards.

November marks the return of the UK IT Industry Awards, the largest and most well-known event in the technology industry calendar. Owned and operated by Computing and BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, the awards enjoy an unmatched level of professionalism and industry knowledge.

This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Wednesday 12^th November in London.

Among the finalists are Lloyds Banking Group and Publicis Sapient, who have jointly reached the shortlist for eight categories.

We talked to Sneha Murdeshwar, Engineering Lead at Lloyds Banking Group, to find out more about the company's biggest challenges and achievements over the past year.

Sneha is a seasoned engineering leader with two decades of experience across major UK and US banks. As Lab Engineering Lead in Markets at Lloyds Banking Group, she drives the delivery of secure, data-driven platforms and advances cloud and engineering maturity.

Known for a people-first approach, Sneha builds psychologically safe, high-performing teams and turns complex challenges into practical, scalable solutions. Her work has been central to Lloyds’ transformation across cloud, data, and modern engineering, and she was recently recognised as a Digital Transformation Leader for her impact and commitment to sustainable progress. She is passionate about innovation, responsible AI and delivering long-term value through engineering excellence.

Why do you think awards like the UK IT Industry Awards matter?

Awards like the UK IT Industry Awards matter because they bring visibility to the people behind complex transformation, especially engineering leaders who rarely sit in the spotlight. In a fast-paced industry, it's easy for foundational work such as modernising legacy estates, strengthening cloud platforms, and building safe, responsible AI capabilities to go unnoticed.

These awards celebrate the craft, resilience and leadership required to deliver real change. As someone who has spent years championing engineering excellence, psychological safety, and diverse, high-performing teams, I see the awards as a platform to recognise the impact of the people who quietly move organisations forward.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

For Lloyds Banking Group, this recognition would reinforce our ambition to be a modern, data-driven organisation that delivers for customers through engineering excellence. In Commercial Banking, we've been taking bold steps, from pioneering Google Cloud adoption to embedding responsible AI and building scalable data products.

Winning would highlight that our approach is working - investing in our people, uplifting engineering maturity, and making deliberate platform choices to improve stability, performance, and client experience. It would shine a light on the engineers, architects, product partners and analysts who make progress possible every day.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

One of our proudest achievements has been shifting from experimentation to real, value-producing engineering delivery. In my previous role in Merchant Services, we built a data & pricing platform from scratch on Google Cloud and Azure, enabling analytics and business insight where previously only reporting existed. We made data accessible, curated, and usable setting the foundation for AI adoption.

We also advanced engineering sustainability through cloud test environment shutdown periods, a practice now spreading across the platforms. Alongside this, we strengthened engineering culture by uplifting cloud maturity, embedding DevOps, and championing reusable platform components that reduce duplication and accelerate delivery.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2025 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

The biggest challenge has been delivering transformation at pace without compromising stability in critical banking services. This required navigating complex stakeholder landscapes, making disciplined prioritisation calls, and ensuring engineers had the psychological safety to surface risks and challenge assumptions early.

My teams have been instrumental in this transformation. They embraced cloud-native principles, modernised legacy designs and resolved long-standing operational challenges through collaboration, automation and clean engineering practices. A key milestone was converting a process and product that had operated manually in Excel for 35 years into a fully digital, scalable, cloud-native solution. By combining radical candour with empathy, we created an environment where constraints could be surfaced early, experimentation was encouraged and progress accelerated, without compromising reliability.

How do you think the industry has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

The financial services industry has moved from exploring AI to industrialising it, with a strong emphasis on ethics, explainability and safety. Cloud modernisation has become more intentional, with organisations focusing on real value rather than lift-and-shift.

However, significant change is still required. Legacy estates remain heavy, slowing down innovation. Data quality and governance challenges continue to hold back AI adoption. And most importantly, engineering leadership needs greater diversity of thought. At Lloyds Banking Group, we're tackling these areas by investing in cloud engineering skills, strengthening responsible AI frameworks, and empowering multidisciplinary teams to deliver sustainable change.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

The key opportunities lie in using cloud and AI to transform workflows, automate decisioning, and personalise client journeys at scale. For commercial and markets businesses, this includes smarter trade execution, faster onboarding, improved surveillance, and deeper analytical insight.

I plan to capitalise on these opportunities by continuing to build strong engineering foundations: mature cloud practices, clean and well-governed data, platform components that scale, and teams that feel empowered to innovate safely. My focus remains on delivering long-term transformation while ensuring customers experience tangible improvements along the way.

The UK IT Industry Awards will take place on 12^th November in London. Click here to view the shortlist.