The London-headquartered banking group, which provides services including private banking, has unveiled a new initiative to support nascent fintech providers.

Lloyds Banking Group has launched a mentoring scheme for financial technology start-ups in the UK.

The mentors will come from all areas of the group and will be matched with start-ups according to their needs and expertise in the areas of business development, technology and marketing. Lloyds aims to initially enrol 100 mentors to work with the same number of start-ups. The mentor and the start-up will work together to refine concepts and strengthen business models.

Initially, companies will be identified through Lloyds’ relationships with its partners at Innovate Finance, a membership association that represents the UK's global fintech community, and with Startupbootcamp through its accelerator programmes. The group will also select start-ups through its collaboration with "women in fintech" networks such as FemTech Leaders. Lloyds plans to launch a platform where fintech start-ups can register their interest and summarise their reasons for seeking mentorship, with the areas they would like support in.

“The mentoring programme is an opportunity to boost our support to the UK as one of the main fintech hubs, allowing us to share the insights of the challenges and opportunities that come with scale and an existing customer base to provide fintechs with a complementary understanding of the market,” said Marc Lien, innovation and digital development director at Lloyds Banking Group.

“Through collaboration and partnerships with start-ups, we can support the evolution of how the financial services sector will serve its customers. This programme will be mutually beneficial as we can also learn lessons from fintech firms’ successes and failures that will help shape and inform our digitisation journey.”

Such a venture is part of a wider trend in fintech innovation activity. For example, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Aviva are just some of the finance companies involved in creating "innovation labs" to ensure they are ahead of upstart fintech challengers. The labs are designed to spawn ideas in areas such as security, client reporting, apps, use of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other fields.