Interview: Lloyds Banking Group, UK IT Industry Awards finalist

'The biggest challenge is balancing innovation and risk controls’

Ryan Kenny, Engineering Lead at Lloyds Banking Group, tells us about the company’s technology progress this year and the opportunities he sees for 2026.

IT is at the forefront of productivity and creativity. No longer seen as a cost centre, it's now widely accepted that people can use technology to improve their working lives.

The UK IT Industry Awards, the largest and most well-known event in the technology industry calendar, exist to celebrate that development. Owned and operated by Computing and BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, the awards enjoy an unparalleled 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.

Lloyds Banking Group a finalist in not one, not two, but 12 categories.

We talked to Ryan Kenny, Engineering Lead (Outcome Testing & Mobile App Sim) at Lloyds Banking Group, to find out more about the company's biggest challenges and achievements over the past year.

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

These awards play an important role in recognising innovation, collaboration and real-world impact. They not only celebrate excellence, but force us all to raise the bar through healthy competition.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

This award would be endorsement of our company's goals and values. But also honour the talent and dedication of our AI, data science and engineering teams to innovate meaning outcomes for our customers.

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

For me the focus on upskilling our people and bringing them on a digital first journey - this is something to be proud of. At Lloyds some of the best and most well-rounded engineers that I have the privilege of working with are colleagues with non-technical backgrounds from other parts of the business, who have gone through one of our many reskilling programmes.

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 continues to be balancing the rapid pace of innovation in the AI and ML space, with the governance and risk controls to implement this innovation safely at scale.

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

The shift for us has been the move from experimentation with AI to industrialisation. We're moving from local disconnected experimentation and testing with tooling capabilities to embedding these tools into connected scalable systems to get the benefits of the output of these experiments - alongside the monitoring to ensure trustworthiness, fairness and transparency, both initially and over time.

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

For me there are two huge opportunities revolving around AI. Firstly, how do we embed AI into our engineering practices, mainly development, test and release cycles to improve cycle time and code quality? Secondly, embedding AI into our systems to improve business capability and enable us to serve our customers better.

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