Fujitsu lands Lloyds TSB IT outsourcing deal

Fujitsu has beaten off competition from IBM to land a major IT outsourcing deal at high street bank Lloyds TSB.

The move comes just a month after Lloyds TSB signed a £500m seven-year deal with IBM to outsource its voice and data network.

The latest deal is for the remaining part of Lloyds TSB's group IT distributed services function and has been dubbed "Project Amazon" internally. Around 167 Lloyds TSB staff and 30 temporary workers, mainly based in Bristol, transfer across to Fujitsu under TUPE legislation.

The handover is due to take place on 1 April 2005 and the bank is now in a due diligence phase of negotiations with Fujitsu. No value has yet been placed on the deal.

Banking union Amicus-Unifi said a key element of the bank's choice between Fujitsu and IBM was the location of the work. IBM had said transferred staff would have to relocate while Fujitsu has undertaken that the outsourced work will stay in Bristol, allowing transferred to staff to keep their jobs.

No-one at Lloyds TSB was available for comment.