Lloyds Banking Group has formed a strategic partnership with Google and the Advanced Skills Institute for a major data analyisis project as it seeks to get closer to its customer base.

Under the deal, the bank will use Google's analytics platform and tools such as Google Big Query, Data Flow and Big Table, to test the "non-personal" behaviour of its customers. 

It will also tap into the bank's annual UK Consumer Digital Index survey, which gauges the opinions of over a million customers. The 2016 study revealed that as many as 11.1 million people have a low digital capacity and 86% of the people who manage their money online "worry less because they can track their finances".

The insights gained will be used to build an understanding of Lloyds' consumer requirements and serve them accordingly in real time. 

"Right at the start of the partnership we were able to reduce time to insight from 96 hours to 30 minutes by using BigQuery, allowing us to react in real time to customer needs and provide better service," Gary Sanders, head of Lloyds Bank's digital analytics team, told Banking Technology. 

A joint team from Lloyds and Google worked in a trial project and were able to analyse a year's worth of front-end analytical data in under a minute.

Reza Rokni, cloud platform solution engineer at Google, claimed the new partnership will give Lloyds a major advantage over its rivals. He added: "This is the first time we've done something like this with a bank, and it's placed Lloyds about 18 months ahead of its peers in the use of data analytics."