Each week, we dig into the memory bank of the City’s great and good. Today, Suresh Balaji, chief marketing office at Lloyds Banking, takes us through his career in Square Mile and Me

CV

• Name: Suresh Balaji
• Job title: Chief marketing and experience officer at Lloyds Banking Group
• Previous roles: Global head of marketing and communications at Standard Chartered; CMO Asia and global head of media and marketing innovation at HSBC; NED of a Blackstone-invested marketing technology firm, other roles in banking and pharma. 
• Lives: South west London
• Studied: Chemistry, then a postgraduate in global business at Saïd Business School, Oxford
• Talents: Imagination and storytelling
• Motto: Nullius in verba. Take nobody’s word for it. 
• Biggest perk of the job: I get to hang out with Cancara, the Lloyds Bank black horse
• Coffee order: Small cappuccino from Rosslyn. Cocoa on top only on Saturdays
• Cocktail order: A protein shake from Joe & the Juice, I’m afraid
• Favourite book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

What was your first job?

Selling vaccines to medical practitioners, long before vaccines became a dinner party topic. Turns out the hardest sell in the world is prevention, because nobody ever thanks you for the disease they didn’t get. Everything I know about marketing intangible value, I learned in a GP’s waiting room.

What was your first role in the City?

This one, strictly speaking. Although if you’ll grant me Canary Wharf as the City’s younger, taller cousin, I was global head of media and marketing innovation in a previous life.

When did you know you wanted to build a career in the City/banking?

I studied chemistry, which is essentially the study of what happens when two things that shouldn’t work together do. Then vaccines, then a stint in advertising, then a chow-mein of a career in banking across Asia-Pacific, Middle East and London. I’m not sure I ever decided on a career so much as kept following the more interesting.

What’s one thing you love about the City of London?

The density of unimaginable juxtaposition. You can walk five minutes and pass a Roman wall, a Wren church and three people building AI agents in a basement. Two thousand years of continuous reinvention inside a single square mile.

And one thing you would change?

The majority of the City runs almost entirely on league tables, titles and promotions, and almost not at all on whether the work was any good. I’d also retire the belief that seriousness and imagination are opposites. The city still dresses its best ideas in the dullest jargon. It’s refreshing to see how Lloyds is breaking that mould everyday. 

What’s been your most memorable business lunch?

Meeting Tim Berners-Lee. He gave the web away rather than monetising it, which is arguably the most consequential marketing decision in history and the precise opposite of what any of us would have advised him to do.

And any business faux pas?

I did a short stint in advertising in the days of proofs and bromides. We published a full sale advert with the client’s logo missing. Fallen clean off. We rang them and explained, with total conviction, that it was the teaser phase of the campaign, and they loved it. I’ve been suspicious of confident explanations ever since, including my own.

What’s been your proudest moment?

Successfully refreshing a 250-year-old brand in Lloyds and a 350-year-old brand in Scottish Widows in the same year. Making them ready for the app and AI economies and everything that follows. 

And who do you look up to?

I run my career like a business, which means I have a personal board of directors. Five of them: three women, two men, four older than me and one younger. I go to them when I’m stuck. They’d rather not be named, which is precisely why the arrangement works.

What’s the best career advice you’ve ever been given?

Uncertainty is the price of an interesting career. The certain jobs are rarely the interesting ones, and certainty is usually what a role feels like just before it becomes irrelevant.

And the worst?

“Stay in your lane.” Everything worthwhile I’ve done has happened in the gap between two lanes. Or an interesting never-trodden lane. 

Are you optimistic for the year ahead?

Yes, and for an unfashionable reason. All our experiments in AI and emerging tech points to the fact that augmentation is what will win, and I am fortunate to work with brilliant minds that are taking the lead in the space. 

We’re going for lunch, and you’re picking. Where are we going?

Fish katsu curry takeaway from Deli-Box near St Paul’s on a nippy day, finished on a park bench nearby to watch the world hurry by. Unglamorous, perfect, and you’re back at your desk in 25 minutes.

And if we’re grabbing a drink after work?

A neighbourhood boot camp, or a protein shake at Joe & the Juice. I don’t drink, so I’ve quietly swapped the pub round for burpees. Aspirational or antisocial, depending who you ask.

Where’s home during the week?

South-west London, deep in nappy valley.

And where might we find you at the weekend?

Same place, usually on a bike. I commute on a Genesis, and when mine was stolen I tracked down the last one in the country at a hundred-year-old shop in Ipswich and went to collect it in person. Best day I’d had in months. And now I try to use it as often as I can. 

You’ve got a well-deserved two weeks off. Where are you going and who with?

Family, and Luna the dog, who is entirely non-negotiable. Which means the New Forest or Cornwall rather than anywhere requiring a passport and a kennel.