In conversation with

Andrew Walton wears two hats. As chief communications officer and chief sustainability officer at Lloyds Banking Group, he leads two separate teams, and takes, as he puts it, ‘both titles into the group executive committee’.

He is also ‘a longstanding proponent of the notion that if you’re doing sustainability in corporate affairs, you’re doing it wrong because it isn’t CSR. This is not about reputation.’

As Walton explains: ‘In a financial institution with explicit commitments and regulatory obligations, sustainability is a distinct, functional discipline. The vast majority of the work that my [45 person] team do in sustainability is about implementing the obligations put upon us and sharpening the risk management functionality of the business.

‘As a financial institution, we’re also financing the transition to net zero. There are huge risk and regulatory implications and, obviously, finance and reporting implications that arise from that.’

‘I run the teams separately but they overlap, of course, in a variety of ways, partly because our stakeholders on the corporate affairs side care very much about our progress on the sustainability agenda, and also because it is one of our five purpose pillars that drive our responsible business agenda.’

Taking on the additional responsibility two years ago brought a new dimension to his career: social media star. As a corporate affairs professional, Walton believes it inappropriate to appear on the news or on public forums; as chief sustainability officer the opposite is true.

‘I’ve done a lot more customer engagement in that role than I ever have in a corporate affairs role, and across social media, I’m the person that needs to advocate about the progress we are making,’ he explains, adding that Lloyds’ strong sustainability story has won it many clients.

Lloyds has unveiled its sustainability ambitions without ‘an absolute certainty’ on how these will be achieved. ‘That's unusual for any company but particularly a bank,’ he concedes. ‘Some of the qualities of a corporate affairs director doing a sustainability job is being able to fine tune those ambitions to the areas that matter because you can articulate them clearly and the business can lay them out clearly in a way that is persuasive.’

Walton arrived at Lloyds in 2018 from FTI Consulting, and concedes he was ‘very fortunate to join an organisation that already had a mature corporate affairs function with the right balance of capabilities’, adding: ‘The function was taken seriously at the highest level. It had a great relationship with marketing and HR – those internal functional partners are critical in a retail-focused business.’

But it was lacking in social media, employing just one-and-a-half people at group level. ‘We had no active handles across most of the major media channels. We were doing the absolute bare basics. We knew we had to move fast,’ Walton explains.

‘We hired some brilliant talent. We laid out a clear strategic map to completely overhaul our social channels. Today, our social channels [which span X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn] have grown with a content generating capability and a level of sophistication on deployment that has worked well.’

The work has proved timely. While traditional media remains an important channel for Lloyds, ‘the sea change over the past seven years has been gigantic in terms of channels’, he says. ‘How you generate and deploy content to reach your audiences has completely transformed, particularly in the past five years, and I think it’s transforming again. Large language models have become a new vital channel that you have to manage and interface with, and which require you to make a whole series of technical changes.’

Walton is adamant that it is audiences and insight, not the channel nor the content, that comes first. Equally, audiences have a ‘finite amount of bandwidth’ – meaning that the opportunities to reach them are not endless.

He explains: ‘What is the audience we are trying to shift or the arguments we are trying to win? How do we take them there? As long as you understand your audience first and understand their reading habits, and track carefully how they engage with the content you deliver, then you work back from that.’

The ability to fine tune and hyper-localise content has also proved a successful strategy for Lloyds. Obviously, it can write to local politicians to share how a local charity has benefited from one of the banking group’s foundations, but it is often more effective for them to spot a story about the funding while scrolling social media.

Along with a ‘mature’ function, Walton also inherited a bespoke, predictive reputation tracker – since further developed –  that offers insights to guide how his team share announcements.

‘The many years of data that exist in the tracker help us to understand what the potential impact of a story can be. We’re big believers that having the ability to measure and track these things routinely reminds you of what you’re ultimately trying to achieve as the outcome,’ he explains.

‘But equally, from a planning perspective, if all you can see is a concentration of red in one bit, and a concentration of green in another, you have to think Is there anything we can bring forward to balance things out a little bit? Do I want that separation? And sometimes you do, because doing stuff that is messy all in one go can be a good thing.’

In recent years, Walton’s team has started ‘to recognise the reputational upside’ of clustering announcements. ‘If you have a series of announcements about a particular area, say we’re focusing on affordable housing, then people notice when you have three or four things in a row. LLMs really notice. The media notices. Stakeholders notice. So a lot of our focus this year has been to say Can we move things around so they cluster together and we get a sense of momentum?’

It is more complex than it sounds because corporate affairs may not control time scales. ‘But if predicably you can see all the positive impact, it does give you the opportunity to say If you push this forward by a month, it would really help because you’ve got this and this happening across the business,’ he says, adding: ‘The corporate affairs function is much better at that because it sees across everything. You can be the collaborative grease that basically helps everything.’

A coherent set of five or six meaningful announcements, initiatives or events is ‘the perfect storm’, says Walton. ‘Even just three or four can make a meaningful difference because people just go Okay, that’s what they are known for.’

But it is also essential to ‘get under the bonnet’ of the data if it is to be of any value. Walton regularly tests its quality with spot checks where 50 articles will be reviewed by his team against the scores generated by the tracker. ‘If more than 20 per cent are off beam, then you have a problem. Data quality is always an issue,’ he explains.

Walton believes that LLMs are both an opportunity and a threat for corporate affairs. ‘We’re learning as we go. It's an important way our audiences are looking at us, and unless we feature highly in the search outcomes, then what's the point, right?  If the numbers are true, right, huge numbers of our customers are going there for our products and services,’ he explains.

‘We’re constantly asking ourselves whether the ecosystems that people engage with us through, which is currently apps on phones, whether that will still be the case.  Will we actually appear in LLMs in due course?  Is that where people are going to go?  These channel debates are big strategic questions for any business.  They're definitely a big strategic question for us.

‘You can be disintermediated in your corporate affairs function.  Because people go to a different place to start understanding about you.  We saw that in social media, and we've all adapted to that.  I think we're seeing it in LLMs, we'll all need to adapt to that.  It's just a channel evolution, but you're definitely going to have to be better at it.’

It is this combination of communications expertise, commercial acumen and enterprise-wide perspective that led Walton to pick up the trophy for Communications Professional of the Year at last year’s CorpComms Awards.

Walton has a seat – technically two – on the executive committee. But he is clear.  

‘You are not a corporate affairs director in that moment. You’re a member of small group of people who are running the bank. We all hold each other to account. We are explicitly charged with not just sitting in our role. We are collectively responsible for everything. I don’t just speak about reputation.’

Having only ever worked in financial services, Walton says he sometimes finds himself, ‘much to my astonishment’, playing the old hand in these meetings: ‘I’ve seen this movie before. I know what happens.’

But that confidence needs to be backed by real commercial grounding: understanding how the business works, coupled with financial literacy and experience, empowers him to challenge the prevailing view at times – suggesting an announcement won’t land well, or that the questions board members expect won’t be the ones asked.

He adds: ‘When you're ultimately in roles like this, you're going to have to rehearse your CEO for quite big moments. Unless you are very confident in understanding those issues, it's career limiting.’

Lloyds’ business strategy is aligned to its corporate purpose – Helping Britain Prosper – which, Walton says, drives the behaviours and culture of the business. Decisions are made through the prism of acting as a responsible business.

But on occasion, what is commercially right for the business – such as reconfiguring the branch network or fee structure – could have reputational implications. ‘As a corporate affairs director, you need to have the confidence to say Yes, it will be reputationally bumpy, but here’s how we will manage it. I think we should go ahead,’ explains Walton.

‘If you become the department that says no, you are going to find yourself shut out of conversations pretty quickly. Or at least, replaced with somebody who is just a little more commercial and thoughtful.’

Not all corporate affairs professionals have a seat at the table; a common complaint is being called into a meeting only once a decision has been made.

Walton counters: ‘I hope that I and my team are influential enough that if it's at the beginning or the end of the process, we can help. Clearly, it is more frustrating for everyone if you're brought in at the end of the process and you're the final veto after a whole load of work and therefore time has been wasted.

‘But again, if you add enough value and have got great internal network and collaborative relationships and people know that you have the authority internally to kill something off at the end, they'll come to you at the beginning, right? Because nobody wants to bring everything all the way to the top of the house only to find that, for reputational reasons, we veto it.’

Walton’s success may owe much to Lloyds’ mature corporate affairs function, but the lessons extend well beyond banking. In an era of fragmented audiences, AI-powered discovery and increasingly complex stakeholder expectations, the corporate affairs leaders who thrive will be those who combine communications expertise with commercial judgment.

Reputation remains important, but as Walton’s career demonstrates, influence comes from helping run the business, not simply talking about it.

.