Helene
Helene Benz is a Design Lead at Lloyds Bank in London, where she leads design strategy and teams behind the bank's conversational AI assistant. Previously she designed for electric vehicles at Arrival and govtech at Public.
Helene is happiest solving problems in the company of curious, kind, and direct people. Some of her current interests include frameworks for human-AI interactions, electric & autonomous vehicles, Dungeon Crawler Carl book series, preventative healthcare, and problems where the physical and digital overlap.
She holds both American and British citizenship.
Select works
LLOYDS
ARRIVAL
PUBLICJourney
Stanford University: BA Science, Technology & Society
Royal College of Art: MA Service Design
Lloyds Bank
2025 – Current
Leading two design teams: AI Search using LLM-based triage and AI-generated answers to simplify the core banking app experience, and building a market-competing AI interface for the Lloyds app, currently in beta. Co-led the design function's growth from 14 to 33 designers as we scale agentic AI from concept toward enterprise-wide rollout.
Public
2015 – 2018
Convened 25 EU policymakers to inform Airbnb’s position on incoming short-term rental data-sharing legislation, producing the framework used to structure the policy debate through to the EU’s Nov 2023 political agreement. Set service vision for a RegTech product, shaping the roadmap and product refinement
Arrival
2020 – 2022
Built Arrival’s multi-vehicle onboarding experience from 0-to-1, creating the first user interaction repository across multiple vehicle platforms, validated through structured user testing ahead of launch. Led the end-to-end service blueprint for Arrival's van platform, working directly with functional leads across the company to stitch a fragmented, cross-team effort into one coherent story. Identified dozens of critical business gaps and drove with leadership address.