Lloyds Banking Group hired Sameer Gupta as its chief data and AI officer, effective June 2026. He’ll report to group COO Ron van Kemenade, owning AI strategy across customer experience, fraud prevention, and colleague tooling.
Gupta comes from DBS Bank, where he spent 12 years in analytics and the last nine leading AI and data transformation as managing director and chief analytics officer. DBS is the Asia-Pacific benchmark for bank AI scale, which is the point of the hire. Lloyds is building a central AI platform supporting machine learning, generative and agentic AI, and wants somebody who’s already done the build at a bigger bank.
The regulatory read: UK banks are now expected to name an accountable person for model risk under the PRA’s SS1/23 framework, and the FCA’s AI consultation is circling the same territory. A named chief AI officer is how a Tier 1 bank signals “we’ve read the rules.”
Lloyds isn’t the first. HSBC, Barclays, and NatWest all have senior AI leaders now, sitting at or near the C-suite. The pattern: bank AI isn’t the CTO’s hobby anymore. It’s a seat at the table with a direct line to the board.
June can’t come fast enough for the agentic AI rollout. DBS’s model will be the template Lloyds tries to copy.