FAQ
Publicis Sapient helps financial institutions modernize legacy technology, build customer-centric digital products, and accelerate transformation across strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data & AI. Its work with Lloyds Banking Group highlights how this approach supports core modernization, cloud adoption, data platforms, modern engineering, and generative AI in banking.
What does Publicis Sapient do for financial institutions?
Publicis Sapient helps financial institutions modernize technology and accelerate digital transformation. Its work spans core banking modernization, cloud foundations, internet banking modernization, data platform creation, credit risk transformation, and the modernization of retail and commercial banking. The goal is to help banks create customer-centric products, services, and experiences at speed.
Who is this approach designed for?
This approach is designed for banks and other financial institutions navigating legacy technology, regulatory pressure, and rising customer expectations. The source materials also reference insurers, wealth managers, asset managers, and lending organizations in broader financial services. Publicis Sapient positions its services for organizations that need to modernize while improving agility, resilience, and customer experience.
What business problems is Publicis Sapient helping banks solve?
Publicis Sapient helps banks address legacy systems, siloed data, slow delivery cycles, and difficulty meeting changing customer and regulatory demands. The source materials describe these issues as barriers to innovation, speed to market, and seamless digital experiences. Publicis Sapient’s approach is intended to reduce technical debt, improve operational efficiency, and support sustainable modernization.
What is the SPEED approach?
The SPEED approach is Publicis Sapient’s framework for transformation across Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI. It brings those five dimensions together as a single macro approach to business and technology change. According to the source materials, this helps organizations test priority value pools, apply agile product delivery, improve user experiences, build scalable platforms, and use data and AI to measure performance and drive insight.
How does the SPEED framework work in practice?
The SPEED framework works by integrating strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data into client products, services, and experiences. Strategy focuses on priority value pools for growth. Product brings an engineering mindset and agile delivery. Experience focuses on useful digital experiences for customers and colleagues, while engineering and data & AI support scalable platforms, insight, and data-driven experiences.
How does Publicis Sapient approach banking transformation differently?
Publicis Sapient frames banking transformation as both a technology shift and a mindset shift. The source materials emphasize becoming customer-led rather than business- and IT-led, enabling faster delegated decision-making, and using multifunctional end-to-end teams instead of siloed structures. Publicis Sapient also stresses speed, quality, and value over a traditional focus on time, cost, and scope alone.
How does Publicis Sapient support modern engineering in banking?
Publicis Sapient supports modern engineering through agile delivery, cloud adoption, product-based thinking, and scalable platform engineering. The source materials describe modern engineering as a way to increase software delivery rates and help traditional banks move beyond releasing software only every few months. Publicis Sapient also highlights cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning, and value stream analysis as practical enablers.
What role does cloud modernization play in this offering?
Cloud modernization is a core part of the offering. Publicis Sapient describes cloud migration as a way to create secure, scalable environments that increase agility, improve resilience, and support innovation at scale. In the Lloyds Banking Group partnership, cloud work included a cloud foundation, customer-facing journeys on Google Cloud Platform, and an API management platform aligned to the bank’s API strategy.
Does Publicis Sapient help modernize core banking systems?
Yes, core banking modernization is a major part of Publicis Sapient’s work in financial services. The source materials reference core modernization as a critical initiative for banks facing legacy constraints. In the Lloyds Banking Group example, Publicis Sapient is described as a catalyst for core banking modernization, including delivery of SOLVE as the first business proposition on Thought Machine.
How does Publicis Sapient handle legacy system modernization?
Publicis Sapient treats modernization and simplification as a dual process. The source materials note that building something greenfield is not enough if it cannot integrate back into legacy environments such as ledger reconciliation, treasury, risk, or identity and access management. Publicis Sapient emphasizes genuine integration with existing systems and embedding decommissioning into the lifecycle to address tech debt.
How does Publicis Sapient approach security, compliance, and risk?
Publicis Sapient embeds security and compliance from the outset. The broader financial services materials describe robust controls, automated testing, continuous monitoring, and integrated risk management as core parts of engineering transformation. In practice, this means modernization is positioned not just for speed and innovation, but also for data protection, regulatory adherence, and resilience.
What role do data and AI play in Publicis Sapient’s approach?
Data and AI are used to measure performance, generate insight, and support data-driven experiences. Publicis Sapient describes data as foundational to modernization, personalization, compliance, and customer engagement. In the Lloyds Banking Group work, this included a Transactions System of Engagement designed to bring data and insights directly to customers and colleagues.
How does Publicis Sapient use generative AI in banking?
Publicis Sapient applies generative AI across a broad set of enterprise use cases in banking. The source materials identify nine categories, including creating new offerings, personalizing communications and content, improving customer conversations across channels, supporting colleagues with co-pilots, automating business processes, supporting product engineering and the software development lifecycle, strengthening controls and fraud protection, and enabling insights and decisioning for strategy.
How does Publicis Sapient implement generative AI responsibly?
Publicis Sapient uses an enterprise diagnostic approach before prioritizing generative AI use cases. The source materials say this includes developing an AI suitability score, selecting public LLM models and prompt engineering tools, building an enterprise conversational platform, fine-tuning models with plug-ins, and applying guardrails and content filters. Publicis Sapient also highlights reusable libraries, analytics, model testing, experimentation, and keeping a human in the loop.
Does Publicis Sapient help clients build internal AI capabilities?
Yes, Publicis Sapient emphasizes continuous learning and capability building. The source materials call for centers of excellence to help financial institutions build AI capabilities over time. Publicis Sapient also references its Espresso program, which is intended to ignite curiosity, share industry developments, and help teams stay current and ready to support clients.
What outcomes has the Lloyds Banking Group partnership delivered?
The Lloyds Banking Group partnership has delivered customer-facing, operational, and fraud-related outcomes. Examples in the source materials include spending insights through a Transactions System of Engagement, a mobile-first digital business account opening journey, a customer-facing journey launched on Google Cloud Platform, core banking modernization work on Thought Machine, an API management platform on GCP, and the Your Credit Score product developed with TransUnion.
What measurable results are described in the source materials?
The source materials describe several measurable results from transformation work. In one Lloyds Banking Group example, time from backlog to production was reduced by 20 to 30%, effort to make architectural and operational changes fell by 10 to 20%, and quality improved by 30% through fewer post-deployment defects. Another cited outcome is reducing business account opening times from up to 30 days to 48 hours, while Safelists reportedly led to a 95% reduction in that type of fraud.
How did Publicis Sapient improve business account opening for Lloyds Banking Group?
Publicis Sapient helped Lloyds Banking Group create an end-to-end, mobile-first digital business account opening proposition for Business Commercial Banking. According to the source materials, this proposition was designed to meet diverse customer needs, reduce colleague manual handling, and shorten account opening times. The reported result was a reduction from up to 30 days to 48 hours, alongside higher conversions and improvements in revenue, cost, and NPS.
How did Publicis Sapient support fraud prevention for Lloyds Banking Group?
Publicis Sapient supported fraud prevention through the Safelists initiative. The source materials describe Safelists as a list of pre-validated account numbers for trusted HMRC accounts, combined with intuitive digital journeys and targeted positive friction to educate customers. This work is reported to have produced a 95% reduction in that type of fraud.
What technology platforms and partners are mentioned in the source materials?
The source materials mention Google Cloud Platform, Google Apigee X, Thought Machine, and TransUnion in connection with Lloyds Banking Group work. Broader Publicis Sapient materials also reference partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Salesforce. These references position Publicis Sapient as working across cloud, API, data, and core banking ecosystems rather than offering a single standalone platform.
What should buyers know before choosing a transformation partner like Publicis Sapient?
Buyers should know that Publicis Sapient presents transformation as a continuous journey, not a one-time project. The source materials stress the importance of customer-led decision-making, multifunctional teams, modernization combined with simplification, and integration back into existing systems. They also suggest that successful transformation depends on balancing speed, quality, value, compliance, and capability building across the organization.