Innovation Venture Lead

End Date

Friday 20 March 2026

Salary Range

£76,194 - £89,640

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Job Description Summary

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Job Description

Job Title: Innovation Venture Lead
Location: Manchester
Salary: £78,098 – £91,880
Hours:  Full time
Working Pattern: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in office a week.

About us

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. Including you!

About this opportunity

As the Group continues its ongoing strategic transformation, LBG has created a new function to identify, develop, and deliver new opportunities in Horizons 2 and 3. This new function works across siloes and domains, accelerating the delivery of innovations that will shape our future.  

As Venture Lead, you will be at the forefront of this initiative, leading a cross-functional Venture Team, tasked with developing innovation through our in-house process.  

Having been assigned an opportunity area in which to pilot, the Lead establishes the overarching vision and strategic direction for the team. Using our proprietary method, they will ensure each pilot’s strategic alignment, viability, and potential impact on the broader business. They orchestrate resources, navigate stage gates, and guide their team toward successful product or venture outcomes. 

This role requires a leader who embraces ambiguity and energises others, and will represent Group Innovation within the bank. The role requires breadth: combining creative exploration and visioning with sharp strategic and commercial thinking to generate, validate, articulate, and develop ambitious ideas for the future of financial services. 

What You’ll Do 
 

• Lead small specialised teams to explore and develop emerging opportunity areas through the whole innovation life-cycle. These opportunity areas will be both internally-facing and consumer-facing. 

• Develop deep understanding of user problems, the competitive landscape, and LBG’s opportunities to win in new areas and adjacencies. 

• Engage internal and external experts to sharpen early-stage thinking and develop emerging concepts. 

• Collaborate cross-functionally with partners (designers, researchers, engineers, commercial teams, etc.) to build, refine, and strengthen ideas throughout the process. 

• Map key assumptions and coordinate initial testing plans with research and analytics to validate early-stage concepts. 

• Build compelling, data-led arguments to support the concepts your team develops, with a view to rapidly proving or disproving the viability of options. 

• Challenge conventional thinking and present bold ideas aligned with LBG’s mission and customer/stakeholder needs. 

• Develop and iterate concepts with clear value propositions and a path to commercialisation. 

What you’ll need
 

• Visionary Thinking: A creative force with the ability to generate and champion bold, transformative ideas. 

• Analytical and Strategic Rigour: Combining imagination with sharp analytical thinking to identify opportunities and shape them into actionable paths forward, including business model generation. 

• Thriving in Complexity: Rather than being told ‘the right answer’, you are ready to explore in ambiguous or unstructured environments, bringing clarity to undefined challenges. 

• Fostering collaboration: You bring people together to co-create, driving alignment and inspiration across teams. 

• Customer-centricity: You understand and empathise with customer needs, crafting ideas that deliver both user-desirability and tangible value. 

• Hands-on leadership: You can run your own ship, bringing a small team on a journey, carrying them through twists and turns, and enlisting the support of stakeholders from outside the innovation arena. 

Useful experience 
 

• Experience in strategy/innovation consulting, corporate innovation, product management, fintech, VC, or growth strategy roles. 

• Experience of successfully identifying and developing new business opportunities or ventures. 

• Understanding of innovation frameworks and approaches, including Lean Start-up. 

• Experience facilitating cross-functional teams and driving consensus in complex organisational environments. 

• Ability to translate market insights into actionable business strategies. 

It would be great if you also had 
 

• Familiarity with financial services, fintech, and the emerging technology landscape. 

• A portfolio of successful innovation projects demonstrating impact on business growth. 

• Comfort working with market research, and both qualitative insights and quantitative analysis. 

• A track record of building strong relationships with external partners and ecosystem players. 

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in/all its forms.

We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.

And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups.

We’re disability confident. So, if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:
 

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%.

• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance.

• Share schemes including free shares.

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top.

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies.

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow and thrive? Apply today and find out more.

At Lloyds Banking Group, we're driven by a clear purpose; to help Britain prosper. Across the Group, our colleagues are focused on making a difference to customers, businesses and communities. With us you'll have a key role to play in shaping the financial services of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you'll have many opportunities to learn, grow and develop.

We keep your data safe. So, we'll only ever ask you to provide confidential or sensitive information once you have formally been invited along to an interview or accepted a verbal offer to join us which is when we run our background checks.  We'll always explain what we need and why, with any request coming from a trusted Lloyds Banking Group person. 

We're focused on creating a values-led culture and are committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. Together we’re building a truly inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference.