Digital Eagles

To embrace the digital revolution, we provided colleagues across our branches with Apple iPads to improve our customer experience. Some of our colleagues let us know they weren’t all confident in using the technology, so we decided to change that.

In April 2013, 18 colleagues stepped up to become our first Digital Eagles. Their mission was to spread a passion and enthusiasm for all things digital – and to help their fellow colleagues become more confident with technology and improve their digital skills.

We took it online, too. We created Digital Wings, which is a free tool for everyone. 

As our Digital Eagle program started to grow, we connected with local communities to work out what we could share with customers, organisations and charities.

In order to help as many people as possible, we launched Tea & Teach. These sessions are free, friendly and a great way to build confidence with all things tech. They’re based in our branches, libraries and local community centres across the UK, on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis. So whether you want to learn the basics of the internet or want to know more about the latest technology, our Digital Eagles can deliver these sessions.  

A skills gap report showed that one million jobs would remain unfilled if young people didn’t learn computer-programming skills. Thanks to reports like this, learning to code was added to the National Curriculum in schools across the UK. We were very keen to support in bridging this digital skills gap, so we launched our Code Playground.

Code Playground lets young people visit our branches, make use of our free Wi-Fi and learn new coding skills – all to help them in their future careers. 

We saw an opportunity to create dedicated spaces to help our local communities thrive – so we transformed parts of our branches to launch Eagle Labs .

We now have 18 labs across the UK that are open to everybody – whether you’re an inventor, innovator or a mentor, our spaces aim to nurture and grow your idea with our support.

Thanks to the success of Digital Eagles, we continued to create partnerships in our local communities in 2017. We also supported universities in the UK to help students become more tech-savvy and find ways to support their peers. 

We launched the £10m Barclays DigiSafe campaign in May to help fight back against the growing problem of cybercrime, fraud and scams. We also created a bespoke Digital Safety Tea & Teach session to raise awareness of the potential risks we face online. Together in 2017, we helped to stop over £857m worth of fraud. 

To find a session near you, visit our Tea & Teach page.

We’re seeing huge advancements in technology – and a lot of changes to the financial industry. But we’re as committed as ever to keeping our colleagues, customers and local communities up to speed with what’s new.

We’ve created new Tea & Teach sessions on the introduction of Open Banking, how to become data smart and have hosted our first ever Code Playground via YouTube Live – beamed directly to schools across the UK.