Banking giant will give employees, including APAC, flexible work arrangements.
International banking group, Standard Chartered Bank has undertaken a five-year, strategic global agreement with Amazon Web Services, which includes the bank running its strategic banking systems and customer facing applications on AWS.
Standard Chartered Bank will work with AWS to drive its digital transformation and deliver new personalised banking services in the bank’s 60 markets worldwide. Using AWS’s reliable infrastructure and cloud services across its entire business will enable the bank to be more responsive to customer needs and create new applications.
Standard Chartered will adopt AWS to improve resiliency, security, and privacy, while meeting compliance requirements across the bank’s global footprint.
Adopting a cloud-first approach, Standard Chartered will use the breadth and depth of AWS services, including database, containers, compute, networking, storage, and security, to reinvent the digital banking experience, accelerating the design and deployment of new applications and digital services for its individual and corporate clients.
Standard Chartered is using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run significant applications and quickly introduce new services with the utmost security, reliability, and scalability. For example, the bank launched its nexus banking-as-a service solution and Mox, its newly released virtual bank in Hong Kong, on AWS and continues to leverage AWS services to add new functionality to both.
The bank’s award-winning global payments system, SC Pay, and core banking system, eBBS, are cloud-native services that use Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native relational database, to store details of banking and e-commerce transactions, including micropayments, resulting in faster and more secure transfer of funds with reduced cost per transaction.
Standard Chartered’s Financial Market business, which includes risk management, financing, and investment services, uses AWS to run algorithms that assess market risk and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to enable the bank to flexibly scale up those workloads during peak demand, said Dr Michael Gorriz, group CIO of Standard Chartered.
“Our continued work with AWS demonstrates our commitment to putting innovation and security at the heart of Standard Chartered’s digital transformation strategy,” he said. “A cloud-first strategy allows us to be more agile and client-focused, so our customers have better experiences and faster access to innovative new products.
According to Dr Gorriz, Standard Chartered are also improving its operational efficiency and resilience by using the best-in-class security, privacy, and compliance delivered through cloud infrastructure.
“We are pleased to collaborate with AWS as a long-term strategic cloud provider and take advantage of their broad portfolio of cloud services and proven expertise to bring secure cloud solutions to the financial services industry,” he said.
Adopting a cloud-first approach makes our vision for next generation financial services – like virtual banking, next-generation payments, open banking, and banking as a service – a reality, noted Bhupendra Warathe, CTO, Cloud Transformation at Standard Chartered.
“A significant number of Standard Chartered’s flagship applications, like our core banking system, eBBS, global payment system, SC Pay, as well as our new digital banking services, Mox and nexus, are already cloud-native. We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to deliver new products and solutions to our clients across the 60 markets we serve,” he said.
Earlier in November the banking giant announced beginning in early 2021, employees in those nine markets – UK, US, Hong Kong, Singapore, UAE and Global Business Services Centres in Poland, Malaysia, China and India – will be able to apply for a formal flexi-working arrangement. Subsequent phases are expected to be offered in Q4 2021 and by mid-2022, with precise details on which markets will be included in phases two and three to be confirmed.
Employees will have the option to select both time (number of hours and/or days) and location flexibility; this could be Standard Chartered premises, a near-office premises, or from home. Additionally, the Bank is partnering with a third party to provide additional ‘near-home’ workspace. It is anticipated most employees will fall into a hybrid pattern, i.e. some days in the office and some days working from home, but a number will prefer to spend 100 per cent of their time either at home or in a Standard Chartered office. Work undertaken by some employees will also not permit them to work from home.
Phase one markets are approximately 54 per cent of the Bank’s total employee population. In subsequent phases the goal is to implement flexi-working options across at least 70 per cent of the Bank and 50 per cent of its markets by the end of 2021 (approximately 60,000 employees across 30 markets) and achieve 90 per cent coverage across both by 2023; equating to approximately 75,000 colleagues in 55 markets.
Over the course of 2020 Standard Chartered Bank, in common with many organisations, has learned to push the boundaries of what it means to work virtually, while proving that it is still possible to deliver the highest standards for clients. The Bank acknowledges, however, that the enforced absence from the office has highlighted the huge benefits that employees and clients obtain from face-to-face interaction.
Taking on board what has been learned, the Bank intends to implement a hybrid approach, combining virtual and office-based working with greater flexibility in working patterns and locations. During October 2020, employees in nine phase one markets were asked to state their preferences for how they want to work flexibly via an expression of interest form, with the overall degree of flexibility to be offered determined by business needs and individual choices.
Rather than simply offering flexible working (which the Bank had in many markets before Covid-19), this process of collecting employee preferences was accompanied by a review of all jobs – where and how they can be done and building an assessment of flexibility at that level – which showed that more than 80 per cent are suitable for more flexible working.
