Lloyds Plans To Buy Embark Group for $542M

Lloyds Banking Group is hoping to boost its status in the investment and retirement sector with its £390 million ($542 million) acquisition of Embark Group.

That’s according to the website Fintech Futures, which said on Friday (July 30) that the deal will enable Lloyds to “improve its ability to address the mass market and self-directed wealth sector.”

In addition, Lloyds hopes to replatform its retirement and pension services while implementing a “market-leading” platform for intermediaries, the report said.

“The move comes as Lloyds continues a strategy of broadening its products on the investment and wealth side,” per the report. “Lloyds says it is targeting a ‘top-three position’ in the individual pensions and retirement drawdown market by 2025.”

The deal will see Lloyds acquire roughly £35 billion ($48.6 billion) in managed assets held by upwards of 400,000 Embark customers, and will likely conclude in the fourth quarter of the year, subject to regulatory approval.

“There’s an ever-growing customer demand for clear, simple and affordable financial planning and retirement products and services,” said Antonio Lorenzo, group director for insurance and wealth at Lloyds. “Our acquisition of Embark […] will sit alongside our existing partnerships, which meet the more complex financial planning and investment requirements of mass-affluent and high net-worth customers.”

The deal comes just days after Lloyds teamed up with Mastercard to launch PayFrom Bank, which lets consumers make direct payments to merchants from their bank accounts. The tool, which is powered by Mastercard’s open banking merchant payment solution, lets shoppers avoid the need to enter payment data or passwords. Funds are deducted straight from the customer’s financial institution. The tool works with most retail bank accounts.

“PayFrom Bank combines Mastercard’s payment gateway capabilities and its open banking connect platform — a universal connection to financial institutions’ open banking functionality — to deliver a merchant A2A payment solution that covers around 95 percent of U.K. bank accounts leveraging open banking APIs,” according to a previous release