Accelerating the adoption of digital solutions.
Resilience is at the core of Standard Chartered Bank, in what has been an extraordinary year for the financial institution.
In its fourth quarter and full year 2020 results, Chartered noted the negative impacts of COVID-19 should be “largely transitory, and indeed have provided powerful lessons that will help us to accelerate our pursuit of better productivity and may even lead to a better world”.
The almost overnight shift to more flexible working should benefitt the bank “both financially and in terms of fostering greater diversity and inclusion, and also caused us to add to our extraordinary focus on keeping pace with escalating cyber, fraud and other threats”, stated Chartered.
According to Mark Smith group risk officer, new technologies and digitisation (including business disruption risk and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence), client expectations and the way they interact with the Group may change, potentially accelerating the adoption of digital solutions.
This includes:
- Monitoring emerging trends, opportunities and risk developments in technology which may have implications on the banking sector
- Rolled out enhanced digital capabilities in Retail Banking, particularly around onboarding, sales and marketing
- Enhancing capabilities to ensure our systems are resilient, we remain relevant and can capitalise quickly on technology trends
- Continue to make headway in harnessing new technologies, and are investing in machine learning solutions that rapidly analyse large data sets and fine-tune the accuracy of Chartered’s financial crime tools Increased data privacy and security risks from strategic and wider use of data
Regulatory requirements and client expectations relating to data management and privacy are increasing across our markets, including the ethical use of data.
This includes:
- Actively monitoring regulatory developments in relation to data management, data protection and privacy
- Established a dedicated Data and Privacy team to build data management and privacy expertise across the Group while ensuring compliance with data ownership and consent requirements Increase in long-term remote working providing new challenges
In Smith’s review the number of employees working remotely and increasingly advanced capabilities of threat actors have raised this risk in addition to internal (supervision, culture and support) and external (clients and other counterparties) considerations.
“The Group has assessed the risk, impact and robustness of continuity plans for pandemic critical vendor services supporting critical banking operations,” he stated. “We actively monitor cyber threats and risks, and have implemented heightened technical and organisational measures designed to prevent, detect and respond to threats.”
The Group is undertaking a Future of Work assessment which considers data privacy and cyber security in addition to culture and leadership.
In the first half of the year we introduced a number of enhancements including the elevation of Model Risk to a Principal Risk Type (PRT), as well as refreshes of the Risk Type Frameworks for Information and Cyber Security Risk and Operational Risk, noted Smith.
