Commencing from 2020, the wealth management division of Standard Chartered Bank began an ambitious journey to scale up its digital platform capabilities, with some of its key projects coming to fruition two years later.
At the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2024, hosted by The Digital Banker in Singapore, Standard Chartered Bank won a number of awards for its wealth offerings, as well as high acclaim for its digital initiatives, further cementing the bank’s leading position in the wealth management sector globally.
Digital Empowerement
One of Standard Chartered Bank’s key projects included the rollout of myWealth Advisor – an industry leading digital wealth advisory platform that empowers Relationship Managers (RMs) and Investment Advisors (IAs) to deliver a holistic digital investment advisory experience to clients.
The clients can co-browse together with their RMs/IAs to experience comprehensive portfolio review, portfolio construction, simulation, and advanced portfolio level risk analytics. Each investment idea is specially tailored to clients, based on their current holdings, transaction history, risk profile and investment preferences. In summary, myWealth Advisor is a simple, personalised, and intuitive platform that was first rolled out in Singapore, followed by Hong Kong and Taiwan, with more markets to follow.
Features of the platform include a comprehensive portfolio review, portfolio health check, portfolio construction and the ability to save client preferences, a simulation of the proposed portfolio, investment proposal report and a seamless execution of orders.
New initiatives and updates to myWealth Advisor include an expanded selection of funds to choose from, wider product coverage including bonds and structured products, increased personalisation for clients and the harmonisation of myWealth Advisor and myWealth Direct to unify the client experience through both the RM-assisted journey and the user self-directed journey.
This initiative has helped RMs realise operational efficiencies by cutting down the time required to give clients an overall financial review from an average of two hours to just under a few minutes. In terms of time savings, this translates to a 75% reduction in the amount of time taken, allowing RMs to deliver quality advice at speed and with consistency, allowing clients to respond to market opportunities quicker and contributing to a significantly improved client experience.
myWealth has also increased the bank’s effectiveness in client engagement, enabling it to engage more clients including the underserved, while also improving on the quality of engagement. In December 2023, clients that went through the hybrid myWealth journey accounted for 15% of the total number of clients that executed UT/Bond transactions. To stay competitive in an ever-evolving industry, the bank is constantly refining and enhancing the journey and features of the myWealth Advisor platform based on feedback and requests from the business, frontline and clients.
For building a stellar digital advisory tool, Standard Chartered was named as the Innovator of the Year for Digitally Empowering RMs at The Digital Banker’s Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2024.
Superior client solutions
myWealth Direct is the bedrock on which Standard Chartered provides a superior automated advisory solution directly to clients, whereby advisory is offered to the clients based on their prior indicated risk appetite and real-time holdings. This then becomes the prerogative of the clients to act on the advice.
Powered by a proprietary, custom-built algorithm engine, myWealth Direct is a fully automated solution built using four key principles:
- Consuming the individual’s profile-level data, portfolio-level data and their investment preferences.
- Defining benchmarks and aligning to market data – Standard Chartered incorporates model asset allocation as defined by its CIO Office, topped with individual recommendations from its Managed Investment Teams.
- Client level data, when put through the algorithm engine and put against benchmarks, results in myriad insights for the bank to offer to its clients.
- Providing an integrated solution – myWealth Direct allows clients to act on these insights provided.
For providing clients with a personalised and automated advisory journey from the convenience of their mobile phones, Standard Chartered’s myWealth Direct was awarded as the Best Automated Advisory Service by The Digital Banker.
Winning client trust
Marking a shift away from a ‘product-pushing’ approach to an explainable advice approach, the myWealth Direct Personalised Engagement is a novel digital sales initiative by Standard Chartered that combines data-driven algorithmic wealth advice and insights with meaningful client engagement to provide clients with the “why” to purchase the recommended investment products.
By using this approach, the bank set itself apart from competitors by providing tailored insights, rationale and investment ideas to each client – taking into account their preferences, holdings, risk level and other market data. The bank also took a hybrid approach, allowing clients to execute their decisions straight from their mobile devices, but also be able to approach their RM should they prefer to consult.
This initiative was recognised by the judges for the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2024, receiving high acclaim under the Best Digital Sales Initiative category.
Adding to the list of accolades, Standard Chartered also won the award for Best Digital Transformation Program, which reimagined its wealth and retail banking operations through the simplification, standardisation and digitisation of processes to create a scalable platform which supports future growth. This initiative underscores the bank’s commitment towards innovation and being best-in-class while delivering value to shareholders.
The USP of Sakura, the bank’s digital transformation program, was that it was a sum of small parts – greater than the whole. Instead of running a big budget transformation program focused on technology simplification, Sakura aimed to get smaller but relatively impactful automation ideas and then fund them to enhance the client experience in a phased manner, as opposed to a “big bang” transformation plan.
The result was obvious, with Sakura significantly enhancing customer experience across various dimensions, while also improving operational efficiency and streamlining tedious processes.
Additionally, Standard Chartered also received high acclaim for its digital financial inclusion initiative – the SC Shillingi Funds Platform for Mobile – which was designed to drive financial inclusion by empowering the people and communities in Africa with financial choices through access to investment products which offer low-ticket size and competitive returns from a simple and seamless digital journey at their fingertips – anytime, anywhere.
