125-Year Old Stanchart To Go 100% Digital

  • Aims to migrate all services to its digital platform by year’s end
  • First in Botswana is also first with Renmimbi for its Asian clients

GAZETTE REPORTER

BSE-listed bank Standard Chartered intends to go wholly digital and provide all its banking services online by the end of this year.

This follows a digitisation strategy that the bank adopted some years ago to set itself apart in the financial services sector where it already offering close to 200 formerly traditional banking services for both retail and corporate clients digitally.

Having reduced its branches by half from 22 to 11, StanChart now intends to focus less on brick and mortar and become a fully digital bank.

Speaking at an Editor’s Forum briefing on Monday night, the bank’s Chief Executive Officer Mpho Masupe said Standard Chartered has been able to transition from incredible losses, sustaining and growing operations, to now focusing on sustainability and being a part of green solutions. This new drive underpins the bank’s ambition to fully digitise its services.

“The biggest thing we want to see about this bank is digitisation, and we are very aggressive about it,” Masupe said.

Head of Corporate Banking, Asuquo Nkposong, told The Botswana Gazette in an interview that there are two phases involved in the process of providing end-to-end services virtually. The first is providing traditional banking services virtually to retail clients while the second phase is providing services to corporate clients.

Nkposong said the pillar of executing these two components is setting up a platform as a digital bank, which has successfully been done already.

“The second step is now providing that financial mall where increasingly different services provided to clients manually are now being migrated to the platform,” he said.
He added that StanChart has already migrated many services to this platform, including 74 retail services and at least 80 percent of all manual services provided to corporate clients.

What will come next is processing loans through the platform. Services like providing clients with information on their loans, repayment profiles and outstanding balances are already being done digitally.

Meanwhile, StanChart recently launched a Renminbi product for its growing Chinese client base. This means the Asian population living in Botswana can now access their home currency at the bank and conduct transactions directly with the currency.

This is the 6th exchange that Standard Chartered has introduced for transactions at the bank and is the first bank in Botswana to introduce such a product. This product too is available online.

These developments come at a propitious time when StanChart is celebrating 125 years in Botswana this year. It first set foot in the country in Francistown and worked with the founding fathers of Botswana to come up with the Pula in August 1976.

StanChart is expected to release its 2021 financial results at the end of this month.