Lloyds Banking Group CEO Charlie Nunn is leading one of the United Kingdom’s oldest and most trusted institutions through one of the biggest technological shifts in its history. As artificial intelligence reshapes financial services, he’s focused not only on transforming the bank, but on expanding access to financial advice, deepening customer trust, and creating a culture that learns as quickly as technology evolves.
In this episode of Brilliant Moves: Coffee with CEOs, Tunde Olanrewaju, McKinsey senior partner and managing partner for Europe, draws on two decades of working alongside Nunn for a candid conversation that spans far more than technology.
Together, they discuss what it takes to lead through uncertainty, why enduring institutions must continually reinvent themselves, and how optimism—from the lessons Nunn learned from his grandmother to the culture he is building today—can become a lasting source of competitive advantage.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Trust, optimism, and reinvention
Tunde Olanrewaju: Charlie, I’m really curious about your vantage point. Lloyds is over 250 years old. McKinsey is turning 100. What does it feel like leading an institution with such a steep history, and how do you think about where you take it?
Charlie Nunn: The first thing is to realize who your customers are and what your role is in whichever business or society you’re operating in. Lloyds Banking Group is deeply, deeply integrated into the UK economy. There are parts of Lloyds that are 330 years old.
You look back at that history and you realize this organization has a relationship with half the adults, one in five businesses, and that 15 to 30 percent of all economic activity runs through this organization.
You’ll have a view of this as well, which is if that’s the heart of your position and the trust from your customers is what gives you an ability to look to the future and help innovate the business and be relevant in the future, you need to work out how you maintain that. The second thing is you need to constantly look to the future to reinvent yourselves.
Tunde Olanrewaju: Banking sits at the heart of people’s lives. That’s where they save their money; it’s where they use loans to realize their dreams. How do you see the role of banks evolving and changing, and what’s happening to the broader sector from your perspective?
If Lloyds Banking Group is going to remain relevant to its customers, to its people, to have the kind of proposition that people want to come to, we’re going to have to continue to reinvent ourselves.
Charlie Nunn: The starting point, I think, is you have to be humble about financial services: virtually no one wakes up every day and is worried about who their bank is. And so, although it’s fundamental to virtually everything that happens in a modern society, it really isn’t a high-engagement product. At the core of it is trust.
But financial services has had to reinvent itself significantly every decade I’ve been working. And when I look to the future, if Lloyds Banking Group is going to remain relevant to its customers, to its people, to have the kind of proposition that people want to come to, we’re going to have to continue to reinvent ourselves.
From digital to intelligent banking
Tunde Olanrewaju: What’s the essence of why an institution can last for so long and thrive? What’s your take?
Charlie Nunn: I joined on the trading floors in the early 90s and the transformation we took this industry through in that period was phenomenal. We went from tickets and telephone brokers and a few thousand trades a day to low latency trading in picoseconds and a fundamental restructuring of financial services. In the ‘90s we had compute and broadband. We then had the internet and mobile. I think the AI revolution is going to be the third really big shift in technology.
Tunde Olanrewaju: I remember the first time I saw ChatGPT before it actually was released. We went to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and they were showing us these models, and said, “You can talk to it.” And I thought, “What do you mean, you can talk to it?” But that was my sort of first aha moment. What was yours?
We had 800 live models before generative AI became a thing. We realized immediately it would finally enable us to do things we’d wanted to do for 20 or 30 years.
Charlie Nunn: I’m a deep tech nerd, a bit like you. We’ve been using AI models since the start of the last decade. We had 800 live models before generative AI became a thing. We realized immediately it would finally enable us to do things we’d wanted to do for 20 or 30 years.
And now for Lloyds Banking Group, we have 23 million people logging on 7 billion times a year. It’s the biggest digital service outside of social media.
It’s just become so quickly adopted. When you look at how customers are using it, what they’re sharing with these tools, and then the ability of the tool to genuinely personalize, you can see the potential for the tools going forward.
Now, it all has to build on everything you do today for customers, the trust we talked about, and then you have to have a really clear vision around how you’re going to add value for customers going forward. I think that’s where both the challenge and the opportunity are for firms as they think about the use of agentic AI.
AI, customer value, and growth
Tunde Olanrewaju: And that trust point comes back again. How are you navigating those things?
Charlie Nunn: At least 50 percent of our time and focus around AI and agentic AI is on how do we improve what we do for customers, how do we differentiate, and then how do we enable growth? And if you think about financial services, it’s about advice and then insight. And the reality is, the vast majority of our customers don’t have access to it.
So, we can bring all of the insight and all the intelligence that we have to more people, and that is just huge.
If you think about the impact on people—individuals managing their lives, businesses trying to think about how they grow—you can genuinely improve financial outcomes for customers. So that’s 50 percent of what we’re doing.
Then the other bucket is: How do we operate and run Lloyds Banking Group so the quality of the service and how we interact with customers is better for customers, more efficient for how we operate, and makes better risk-based decisions?
Really building trust, adding more value for customers, helping them get more value from their financial lives, and then growing your scale can create a massive long-term competitive advantage.
Talent, skills, and the future of work
Tunde Olanrewaju: If you take the jobs dimension, the history of technology has never meant that we’ve had less work. Would you agree with that?
Charlie Nunn: We need to recognize that people need to be upskilled to use those tools in their current jobs, and people are looking to reskill themselves.
We’ve had this amazing experience at Lloyds Banking Group as we’ve started to provide opportunities for leaders, and then broader groups of colleagues, to engage with training and retrain themselves. We’ve launched self-service training. Eighty percent of our 65,000 colleagues engaged with those tools within a few months.
At the same time, we’ve hired almost 10,000 data and tech people in the last few years. There’s a massive demand for those skills to build these services and then optimize them.
I think for the next five years or so, there’s absolutely an opportunity to bring in new talent, but also support reskilling.
How you create an organization that really embraces empowerment with accountability—and a mindset of curiosity, testing, and learning—is what’s going to define the great organizations over the next ten years.
Tunde Olanrewaju: How do you think about your own personal involvement in getting people to adopt AI?
Charlie Nunn: For me personally, it’s about engagement, curiosity, and learning. The real value has come as we’ve set an expectation that we want people to start using these tools—and using them to transform whatever they do. It could be how they serve customers, how they develop new products, or how they think about managing financial crime.
Our top 300 leaders have now all been empowered with tools. They’ve got different levels of capacity and capability, and they’re now using them in earnest.
We’re seeing some amazing test-and-learn use cases, where people are taking everything from simple prompt engineering libraries through to full agentic systems, and starting to add value to their teams, to themselves, and ultimately to the products and customers we serve.
That is going to be the learning by doing.
The whole game here is about increasing the metabolic rate of learning in the organization, so it starts evolving into the future we need.
Tunde Olanrewaju: That’s the magic.
Charlie Nunn: Even with this wave of tech and agentic AI coming, what you and I know is that it’s going to be the talent that unlocks the technology.
It’s not just the individuals. It’s the culture, the ways of working, and the whole environment you create for an organization to really make a difference.
Tunde Olanrewaju: It’s about the environment and the people in it. I think that’s where longevity comes from in the end. People create institutions, and then those structures allow the institution to thrive. I hope we have that shared view and value around enduring institutions.
Charlie Nunn: The whole game here is about increasing the metabolic rate of learning in the organization, so it starts evolving into the future we need.
Actually, McKinsey is the ultimate version of that.
Reimagining the enterprise
Tunde Olanrewaju: McKinsey is a talent organization, and it’s all about getting the next generation of leaders to take over the firm. My mindset is: If you get the tech-savvy, AI-savvy people through and they become the leaders, the rest will follow.
So how good are we at finding, empowering, rewarding, promoting, and getting those people into positions of real influence so they can move the institution forward?
Then the second thing is about reimagination and this point around curiosity. Often you look back to look forward.
Just imagine we were two retailers in the year 2000 and the internet arrived. What you wanted to do was realize you were going to have to sell through the internet and launch an e-commerce part of your business—not run around every store installing broadband.
Sometimes what I think about when I see everyone going around giving people AI tools without doing the reimagination part is that, of course, you needed broadband in the stores and Wi-Fi, but you also needed to build e-commerce. That was totally different from running a retail store. It required a different set of people and a different architecture for your real estate and logistics.
What I often see when I look at companies is that they might not be grappling enough with that reimagination moment.
I’m curious: how do you push people enough so that their transformation isn’t just putting broadband everywhere—it’s actually creating e-commerce?
Charlie Nunn: When you have an organization of scale, you do need to empower it to continue innovating and improving what you do every day.
You need to have that mindset. You need to embrace that kind of leadership. And from an engineering perspective, you need to build the tools that genuinely empower leaders.
Leading through uncertainty
Charlie Nunn: Tunde, you mentioned earlier that great leadership requires an ability to tolerate uncertainty or ambiguity. What does that mean to you?
Tunde Olanrewaju: I think you touched on this notion of how quickly the world is changing.
We worked together a lot during the financial crisis. I started my career at McKinsey during the dot-com crisis. So, I’ve always seen these big, disruptive moments.
At those moments, you really don’t know how things are going to play out. You also start to see that some of the things people think are givens simply aren’t.
I remember when Spotify launched and it was still about iTunes and downloads. Now it’s all about streaming.
Charlie Nunn: And Napster.
Tunde Olanrewaju: And Napster.
I’ve come to the view that it’s not really about whether the innovator survives. It’s about whether their model persists.
Right now, if you’re running an institution like you are, in those moments of uncertainty, how do you absorb, keep learning, and choose what to do?
Charlie Nunn: You need to pick some areas where, as an organization, you’re going to be truly distinctive and genuinely ambitious.
That is the challenge of both good leadership and great organizations today—and into the future.
Leadership, optimism, and looking ahead
Tunde Olanrewaju: I’ve seen you talk a little about the influence of your mum and your grandparents on your viewpoint on life. Maybe just give me a bit of that color.
Charlie Nunn: I had, in some ways, a very normal upbringing and, in other ways, an unusual one. I was largely brought up by a family of women: my grandmother, my mum, her sister, and my sister as well.
If you take an optimistic view . . . you can be very ambitious for your organization, your people, and your customers, and really make a difference.
My grandmother, in particular, was an amazing woman who, after the Second World War, got divorced, went into selling punch card computers, and brought up her family unit without any men around.
Tunde Olanrewaju: Wow.
Charlie Nunn: I spent my time helping her, and then my mum set up businesses and made the money for what was, in our case, four kids. The really interesting thing about my grandmother and my mum was that, despite the challenges they faced, they were always deeply optimistic about their potential, what opportunities life offered, and what you could do. And my gran’s favorite expression was:
“I don’t know who is right, the optimist or the pessimist. I only know it’s the optimist that gets things done.”
That’s a mindset I’ve had from the start.
Tunde Olanrewaju: So that sense of optimism, that’s where you derive your energy. Everyone can point to what’s wrong, but your sense is to push yourself to find the positive, to find the silver lining.
Charlie Nunn: The world is complex at the moment. It’s geopolitically complex, and there’s a huge amount of uncertainty. If you can see through that uncertainty, there’s still a huge opportunity for the world and for societies—if we can build confidence.
Tunde Olanrewaju: So, what’s the optimist’s take? What’s the thing that turns that narrative around?
Charlie Nunn: You need a really clear vision for the future. You need to work out the strengths you’re going to focus your organization and your talent on. Then you need to relentlessly focus on delivering that.
Lightning round
Tunde Olanrewaju: Okay. Coffee or tea?
Charlie Nunn: Black coffee. Easy. Simple.
Tunde Olanrewaju: Black coffee. Alright, why?
Charlie Nunn: Because in this role, resilience and always being on is part of the job. You have to show up five, ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, be relevant and bring energy. Coffee helps.
Tunde Olanrewaju: Cycling is a big part of your life, right? Tell us about that.
Charlie Nunn: I’ve been wearing Lycra and cycling since it was very, very uncool—since the early ‘80s. My sister was very embarrassed by me going out in Lycra back then. Finally, the world’s come to me.
Tunde Olanrewaju: The technical term is “aura loss,” apparently.
Charlie Nunn: Yeah, thank you. My kids would tell me that. But for me, it’s where I do my best thinking. I quite often take one of my biggest problems and go and solve it on the bike.
Tunde Olanrewaju: What’s your TikTok routine? Because I have an extensive one.
Charlie Nunn: I have a limited social media profile. Unfortunately, in the nature of my job—
Tunde Olanrewaju: You don’t have to post. You just have to watch it.
Charlie Nunn: What’s your routine?
Tunde Olanrewaju: No one is allowed on TikTok in my house apart from me. I curate the best videos all week, and every Sunday I show my kids the funniest things I’ve seen. And it’s dynamite. I highly recommend it.
Charlie Nunn: I have the opposite. The kids make me sit down and look at what they’ve found.
Tunde Olanrewaju: So, what are you optimistic about doing next?
Charlie Nunn: How do we really reinvent what great financial services looks like for people, businesses, and society in the UK and beyond?
We support corporates and institutions across Europe and the US. I’ve spent 34 years of my life pursuing this ambition—trying to use technology and financial services across multiple countries to really make a difference.
I think what’s available to us in the next five years could outstrip what we’ve achieved in the last 50 years.
We need to make sure we’re that organization looking into the future.
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