In an era where innovation defines success, Standard Chartered stands out as a global trailblazer. Garnering multiple accolades across multiple fronts at the Digital CX Awards 2025, the bank has redefined client experience through its award-winning robo-advisory solution, a transformative cloud initiative, and a best-in-class structured products platform.
With a sharp focus on personalisation and digital excellence, it has also been recognised as a leading wealth manager for customer experience in Brunei. As the financial landscape evolves, Standard Chartered is not just keeping pace—it’s setting the bar.
Personalising wealth management
Beginning 2020, the wealth management division of Standard Chartered Bank began an ambitious journey to scale up its digital platform capabilities, and in 2022 and 2023, a few of the key projects in this journey came to fruition – including the rollout of “myWealth Direct” in Hong Kong – a key automated advisory and personalised insights-based platform.
myWealth Direct is the bedrock on which Standard Chartered provides a superior automated advisory solution directly to clients, whereby advisory is offered to clients based on their previously indicated risk appetite and real-time holdings. This then becomes the prerogative of the clients to act on the advice.
The platform combines user profile, risk tolerance, users’ holdings as well as SCB market views to provide personalised investment strategies and recommendations. These insights and alerts, tailored to each client’s unique profile, serve as a reminder for them to check if they are heavily concentrated or under-concentrated on asset classes. By providing a smooth and seamless journey, myWealth Direct allows clients to directly execute investment ideas based on personalised recommendations.
What sets myWealth apart from other robo advisory solutions is the fact that it provides personalised wealth management advisory service at scale, directly to clients, equipping Standard Chartered Bank’s clients with the product ideas, amount and rationale yet still allowing clients to make the final decision on their investment journey. This contrasts with most other solutions which executes on the client’s behalf rather than providing an advisory solution.
Additionally, myWealth Direct is also integrated with the bank’s extensive suite of digital wealth capabilities. One of them is myWealth Advisor, the bank’s advisor-facing portfolio advisory platform, to synchronise client’s investment preferences and advisor-proposed trades. The other integration is with Online Mutual Funds, for seamless order execution.
For rolling out an industry-leading digital tool that provides clients with a truly personalised robo advisory journey, Standard Chartered Bank clinched the award for ‘Outstanding Robo Advisory Solution’ at the Digital CX Awards 2025, hosted by The Digital Banker, at the Mandarin Oriental Singapore.
Convenience through cloud
One of the key projects in the bank’s ambitious scale-up of its digital platform capabilities was to deliver a more secure, reliable, scalable and seamless mutual fund journey for clients on both mobile and web channels using cloud technology.
In 2024, it launched a new self-directed Online Mutual Fund platform, that is conveniently accessible from the bank’s mobile and web platforms for all mutual fund needs. The underlying cloud technology offers a secure, 24×7, on-the-go platform, scaling automatically to client traffic. The converged cloud migration synergises platform enhancements across markets with shorter release times.
Clients can access the full suite of mutual fund services such as search/comparison, place buy/sell orders, view market data, track holdings/transactions via the SC Mobile App and web banking channels.
For launching a platform that democratises the investment experience globally, Standard Chartered Bank received high acclaim from under the category: ‘Best Cloud Initiative for Digital CX’.
Leading the way in Brunei
Established in July 2016, Standard Chartered Securities (B) (SCSB) is a locally incorporated company in Brunei Darussalam and wholly owned by Standard Chartered PLC. Through a comprehensive range of investment products and platforms, with the support of Standard Chartered Bank Brunei, it has been leading the market through innovation, consistency, strong growth performance and sustainability initiatives to become one of the leading financial institutions in the market that offers wealth solutions.
SCSB offers one of the most extensive range of products in the Brunei market – over 70 unit trusts from 12 fund providers and over 170 bonds and structured notes.
It also offers digital tools and value-added services to clients in Brunei such as: 1. Interactive Fund Library – available on the website www.sc.com/bn/invest providing easy access to information relating to funds distributed in Brunei, receiving approximately 8,000 monthly views.
- SC Money Insights – podcasts on latest market views with a significant download YoY increase by 52%.
- Fund Select – funds identified and tagged by the fund select team which are also available on the Interactive Fund Library.
- SC Wealth Select – an advisory platform to empower clients to make consistent investment decisions.
- Online investment portfolio statements – giving clients access to latest pricings on their portfolio holdings and easy access to their portfolio statements, which 95% of clients have adopted.
- eAdvice – 97% client adoption for 2024, contributing to sustainability initiatives and reducing carbon footprint.
SCSB also introduced new initiatives to better the overall experience. One of these include Online Client Investment Profiling, which was introduced in July 2024, to allow clients to perform their risk profiling assessment directly through online or mobile banking. Since its rollout, the bank has seen an average adoption rate of 40% since launch. This has helped the bank improve operation efficiencies as the assessments are straight through without manual intervention from back-end operations.
Additionally, SCSB has posted a total of 15 Wealth Wednesday posts and 29 Money Matter articles on its social media platform in 2024 as part of its ongoing effort to raise and educate financial literacy awareness in the community.
For continuously striving to bring in best-in-class wealth solutions and innovation to clients and empowering them to achieve their financial and wealth goals, SCSB was recognised as the ‘Best Wealth Manager for Digital CX – Brunei’ at the Digital CX Awards 2025.
Digitalising structured products
Structured products have been significantly influenced by fluctuations in interest rates and volatility. It was traded initially by institutional and sophisticated investors. As market conditions changed over the rate cycle, in recent years, structured products have evolved to be popular among a wider group of retail investors with more effective strategies to manage market risk, balance return and offer customisation, leading to a significant increase of 220% in sales volume from 2022 to 2024.
To capture this great demand, the need for wealth solution on digital devices is greater than ever before. Understanding that personal touch is a key foundation for nurturing relationships with clients, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) strives to become a human-oriented bank especially for structured products, which are complicated in nature and require professional advice in order to cater to the unique needs of each individual affluent client.
Enhancing its institutional trading capabilities for clients, the bank has significantly built its multi-asset class structured products capabilities with a leading mobile structured products platform to deliver the best solutions at the most competitive price in the market.
Features of this platform include automating the execution of structured products, which allows relationship managers (RMs) to focus on relationship-building. This new digital platform allows an entire structured product transaction to be completed in under five minutes – from previously an hour taken in a branch.
Through the use of open architecture, the platform sources the best liquidity for clients from a panel of market-leading counterparties, thereby offering better pricing options, as well as intuitive pay-off education charts to help clients better understand potential risks and returns.
The platform went live in Hong Kong in Q4 2024, covering all popular payoffs with a wide range of underlying assets including equities, FX and rates for both PI and Mass Retail clients, while also offering enhanced accessibility.
Offering online structured products to clients in Hong Kong comes with stringent, complicated suitability requirements. By leveraging cutting-edge API and microservices-based technology and cloud hosting, Standard Chartered has fully automated 25 such suitability checks, which in turn, has reduced manual operations efforts and waiting time for clients.
The outcome: More than 98% of the bank’s payoff offerings are now supported on the platform, with more than 90% of international client orders now being transacted on the platform, signalling growing popularity among clients.
For demonstrating its competitive edge in delivering a unique digital customer experience for structured products, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) was declared as the winner for ‘Best Structured Product Platform’ at the Digital CX Awards 2025.
