Standard Chartered Bank’s focus on delivering best-in-class solutions for clients pays off at ABF Retail Banking Awards

Standard Chartered Bank brought home six major wins for its many innovative solutions focused on improving client experience.

Standard Chartered Bank Wealth Management’s commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions, customer experience, and advice has been recognised at the recently held prestigious Asian Banking & Finance (ABF) Retail Banking Awards 2023, where the bank won a total of six major awards. These awards include: Wealth Management Platform of the Year - Singapore, Online Securities Platform of the Year - Singapore, Structured Products Platform of the Year - Hong Kong, New Consumer Lending Product of the Year - Singapore, Investment Product Innovation of the Year - Singapore, and Wealth Management Platform of the Year - Brunei.

The bank has been investing heavily in technology and talent to enhance its platform and service, with the aim of providing a best-in-class differentiated value proposition for clients. A key focus has been on delivering wealth propositions digitally and delivering digital experiences with a human touch, which is becoming increasingly critical to best-in-class client experience. The bank’s myRM app allows clients to connect to and communicate with their relationship managers (RMs) and the bank digitally, enhancing clients’ accessibility to their RMs, improving time to market for transactions, lowering costs through a streamlined servicing model, and addressing technical obsolescence risks with the integration of cloud services.

Enhance client experience by empowering relationship managers

Standard Chartered in Singapore has launched online equity capabilities for clients, providing convenient trading access to equity markets across global exchanges for both clients and RMs. Clients can trade via any web-enabled device, such as their smart phone or tablet, and the app is equipped with relevant tools to facilitate investment decisions. Clients have been delighted by this new offering and the flexibility it provides for their investing activities.

Another digital solution delivering outstanding service is the wealth lending service OneOD OneClick, which is integrated into the bank’s existing digital Foreign Exchange (FX) trading platform. This solution empowers RMs to book FX trades on behalf of their clients using their lending facilities. This has reduced the turnaround time needed to perform a loan switch transaction from two days to less than a minute, delivering an enormous amount of efficiency to the platform. The delivery of this service was extremely well-received by clients, resulting in a tripling in the volume of loan switch trades within the first six months of implementation. During this same period, revenue generated by the trades more than doubled.

Additionally, Hong Kong’s retail professional investors (PI) can now fully benefit from Standard Chartered’s automated structured notes platform. The platform allows automated pricing, term sheet and risk disclosure documents generation, real-time pre-trade credit checks and straight through processing across operations, and risk and regulatory reporting platform.

These market-leading features empower RMs to focus on wealth planning and reduce their administrative workload. They are now able to deliver quality advice and product ideas quicker and more consistently to clients. This creates massive benefits for clients, who can now respond to market opportunities more quickly. PI clients in Hong Kong have been very receptive to the new platform. The bank saw a 400% increase in the number of tranches traded in Q1 2023 year-on-year.

Meanwhile, the bank’s wealth platform has enabled it to take a 360-degree journey view of how RMs and investment advisors are being digitally empowered to better serve clients. This has also allowed the bank to better engage clients in all their life goals. As part of this, remote sales has greatly benefited and continues to remedy client needs and eliminate pain points.

Through the platform, RMs can now better access the full list of their clients and filter or sort them based on a range of criteria. Within a month of the digital capability launch in Singapore, it has recorded a 78% adoption rate from RMs, and 60% of total instructions have been submitted digitally through the myRM platform. The tool can now be leveraged to request clients for secure, fast, and easy digital acceptance of orders.

Transforming mutual funds investing experience

Standard Chartered in Singapore has also launched an Online Mutual Funds (OMF) platform for mobile, which is not only its first wealth management direct-to-client application on cloud but also forms a solid base for easily and efficiently scaling this platform to other markets.

The OMF platform provides clients with a hassle-free experience end-to-end, along with a 360-degree view of their mutual fund portfolio and its performance, as well as the entire mutual funds offering at their fingertips. It is also entirely customisable, enabling businesses to tap into market opportunities with a significantly improved turnaround time. The OMF platform has recorded a 75% uptick in transactional volumes within the first three months of the launch, with platform costs down by double, and has also added new channels.

Standard Chartered Bank is proud of the achievements it has made as it continually enhances its digital capabilities, wealth platform, offerings, and client experience. The bank’s enhanced advisory framework – SC Wealth Select, along with other proprietary tools, are helping Standard Chartered Bank’s clients to grow their wealth and deliver on their goals.