Modernising a global bank at scale demands parallel change across systems, skills, and operations, and Standard Chartered is pushing all three at once. Modernising payments infrastructure, reorganising skills around AI, and replacing decades of accumulated complexity are now running in parallel, creating pressure to rethink how technology, people, and operations fit together.
In this conversation, Brian O’Neill, Global Head of Group Transformation, outlines where progress depends less on the tools themselves and more on the institutional choices that determine how quickly a bank can adapt.
How do you balance digital transformation with legacy infrastructure?
The transformation of a large global financial institution with a long history can be complex, and it’s important to balance modernisation with the need to keep the institution safe.
To support this, it’s important to have an end-to-end view across the entire transformation portfolio. This ensures we remain focused on delivering new and useful digital offerings to clients, while balancing this with enhancing legacy infrastructure and simplifying and modernising our technology estate.
We’re currently modernising our payments platform to support continuous cross-border processing with global operational coverage. These services are central to our transaction banking offering, and because clients rely on them at all times, we are also investing in the resilience of our most critical services.
Our transformation work follows the bank’s overall strategy and focuses on areas where it can have the biggest impact for clients and colleagues. For example, we have digitised client due diligence in several of our markets and introduced self-service options for our wealth clients by simplifying and digitising our processes. Over the last six months, greater automation has also helped us reduce asset transfer turnaround times by 34%.
Which technologies best support skills mapping and deployment at scale?
We know that to deliver for our clients and genuinely transform, our colleagues need to keep learning, build their skills, and maintain an adaptable mindset. We have made steady progress in this area, and over the past two years we have seen a 36% increase in colleagues taking on short-term assignments to gain experience beyond their day-to-day roles.
To build on this momentum, it’s vital that we have the right data, tools, and processes to understand the supply and demand of skills, and to support colleagues as they develop their capabilities. It’s also increasingly important that we are clear about how technology, particularly AI, is going to change the way we work across the bank, and what that means for the skills we will need in the future. By planning for this proactively, we can be deliberate about the skills we prioritise across the organisation and how they support both our transformation and the careers of our colleagues.
To support the mapping and deployment of skills, we deployed a single AI-driven digital platform to make it easier for colleagues to understand and map their current and future skills. The platform also guides colleagues on how they can develop these skills through their existing role, short-term assignments, or internal or external learning. This not only supports colleagues in their development, but also gives us organisation-wide data that enables skills-based demand planning and gap analysis.
We have also used AI to determine the skills present in the organisation based on the roles people perform, giving us greater clarity on our overall skills capital and helping us make informed decisions about how and where we build, buy, and borrow critical skills. Over 60% of employees are active in our skills marketplace platform, which has generated over US$8.5 million in productivity.
Which parts of digital transformation in global banking are most underestimated?
When transforming, technology is fundamental. However, delivering digital transformation in a global bank also depends on having the right workforce, culture, and mix of skills required for the work; strong foundational capabilities such as the tools and processes that make use of technology; and core operations and technology platforms that function in a consistent way. These areas often contain pitfalls where the scale of the challenge is underestimated.
First, people. A successful digital transformation relies on well-executed change management, which requires architects, engineers, and business teams to work together with a shared and clear objective.
Second, when it comes to foundational capabilities such as data, a unified data architecture is essential. Within large global financial institutions, the importance of this foundation can be underestimated, making the integration of new systems extremely challenging.
Finally, the modernisation of legacy systems remains a significant factor. The cost and risk involved are often underestimated, creating difficulties that can hinder a successful transformation.
Having a well-planned and coordinated transformation agenda, anchored in a clear strategy, is important to ensure alignment between programs, people, systems, and operations so that we can deliver the client and colleague experiences we aim for.
