Lloyds Banking Group PLC (Lloyds) has made rapid progress in recent months in building its bail-in buffer, which serves to protect senior creditors of its bank operating companies should Lloyds fail. In addition, Lloyds continues to make good progress in further building its strong statutory profitability, improving its comparability with highly rated peers in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. We are raising our long-term issuer credit ratings on Lloyds' bank operating companies by one notch, to 'A+' for the ringfenced subsidiaries and to 'A' for the nonringfenced subsidiaries. The stable outlook on our ratings on Lloyds and its bank operating subsidiaries reflects our view that the group is likely to be resilient, increasingly profitable, and that its bail-in
