Head of Legal - Secured Lending | Lloyds Banking Group
Ian Kirkaldy
Head of Legal - Secured Lending | Lloyds Banking Group
Team size: 12
What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?
My team, based across Halifax, Bristol and Edinburgh advises Lloyds Banking Group’s mortgage business with over £323bn. of mortgage assets, the largest mortgage business in the UK. I am very proud that my team supports this business and it is a privilege to be part of a larger cross functional team supporting LBG’s purpose to ‘Help Britain Prosper’, helping customers become and remain homeowners. We advise on mortgage product development, terms and conditions, contractual arrangements with intermediaries, specialist input into mortgage securitisations, process and policy changes through to complex customer complaint matters and legally sensitive arrears and possession related issues, always with a strong focus on fair customer outcomes. Current areas of focus are sustainability, digitalisation of processes and communications and simplification of the business, for example, we recently advised on the replatforming a £2bn. mortgage book onto a more modern platform, helping avoid negative customer impacts. We advise on issues which can have very significant customer and financial consequences and sometimes it is easy to lose sight of that.
What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months?
AI – this can transform at pace how we work. As a business and in the Legal and Secretariat function we are increasingly focussed on the use of AI, both as a tool to assist us in our daily work and to help customers. For example, my team is leading on a carefully governed AI pilot to support the internal management of terms and conditions.
As the legal landscape evolves, what steps are you taking to foster a culture of continuous learning and development within the legal team, ensuring that they are all well-equipped to address future legal complexities?
I am very fortunate to work for an organisation which invests heavily in the development of all its employees providing a very wide range of opportunities through training courses (for Legal often specialist training from our Panel law firms), secondments to volunteering opportunities. The Group has created an AI Academy to help every colleague be AI literate. Colleagues are encouraged to focus on their own development and line managers to coach colleagues to develop.
