Standard Chartered Bank: Driving Business Outcomes With Data

According to The Financial Brand, 80%-85% of banks lack the process maturity necessary to drive a return on investment (ROI) with data.

Standard Chartered Bank Group Data Technology is working to buck this trend, acting as the central partner that enables other divisions of the bank to access, prepare, analyze, and visualize data. These capabilities, in turn, mean more people and teams around the bank deriving critical insights and arriving at key decisions with data.

In 2020, Data Technology formed the Data Innovation Value Engagement (DIVE) team. The role of this dedicated team is to engage directly with business and other functions to understand their requirements, identify existing solutions within the bank, and explore what is available in the global market to address those requirements.

In a short time, the DIVE team identified strong, enterprise-wide demand for a robust data analytics platform that can handle the data volume and provide the flexibility required to enable a range of roles and personas, from a business analyst to a managing director. 

The platform also needed to empower the growing interest in advancing AI and machine learning (ML) as a regular component of data analytics in the bank. License cost, support, and infrastructure requirements needed to be competitive, of course. Lastly, the product needed to stack up not only against its market competitors but also be a better choice over building internal custom solutions from scratch.

The Dataiku Impact

Across the board, there was no doubt that Dataiku was the right solution for the data analytics needs at Standard Chartered Bank. In less than three years, the DIVE team has onboarded onto Dataiku and supported teams across all divisions in their quest for data analytics excellence. What started with just one team (the financial planning and analysis division) has now grown to be an enterprise gold standard in data analytics.

Not only has Dataiku proven to be the best data analytics platform across the enterprise, but the support and expertise provided by the customer success and sales teams have played a critical role in achieving the data-driven mindset many teams across the bank now enjoy. 

In partnership with Dataiku’s customer success team, the DIVE team:

• Designed and operated the Citizen Data Science Training Program that familiarizes users with Dataiku and introduces them to the fundamentals of data science and ML in practice.
• Created a dedicated training portal with content tailored specifically to onboarding different user profiles through self-service modules based on Dataiku Academy.
• Facilitated building an internal community where users can exchange ideas and help each other with analytical problems.
• Provided demo and coaching sessions to users and prospective users interested in analytics.

All of this further increased interest in data engineering, analytics, AI, and ML across the enterprise, with 518 staff members completing the company’s Citizen Data Science Training Program since 2020. Out of those, 237 completed the training in 2022 — indicating an exponential increase in interest and participation. Plus, more than 700 have completed Dataiku online training courses for a total of 123 Dataiku certifications.

Data & Analytics Use Cases at Standard Chartered Bank

All lines of business now use Dataiku, with demand for training increasing by 400% since 2020 and the adoption rate for the platform more than doubling in the past year. Here is a look at just some of the Dataiku stories and use cases from around Standard Chartered Bank.

Building Collective Intelligence in FP&A

By 2021, one year into their Dataiku journey, Craig Turrell — Head of Plan to Perform (P2P) Data Strategy & Delivery at Standard Chartered Bank — and his team are using Dataiku to run three major systems at the bank and to refresh daily Tableau dashboards for all the bank’s finances, a laborious task previously done in spreadsheets. They’ve developed a data marketplace that people across the organization can leverage for plugging in other pieces to get answers from data (for example, analysts trying to understand the cost of property can use the balance sheet from the data marketplace and plug in lease data).

On average, two people in the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team armed with Dataiku applications are doing the work of about 70 people limited to spreadsheets. That means increased analyst productivity by a factor of 30 by replacing spreadsheet-based processes with governed self-service analytics.

“Dataiku can do single operations on the amount of compute capacity you have somewhere in your ecosystem — doesn’t matter where it is. It’s amazing technology. Sometimes the data is small, sometimes it’s very big. Sometimes it’s a graphic problem. At some point you’ll want to go from just processing lots of data to adding value. You just need that flexibility, and Dataiku provides it.” Craig Turrell Standard Chartered Bank

Data-Informed Space Planning

The emergence of hybrid work has drastically changed the frequency of how often people go to the office. Standard Chartered Bank saw their global office attendance go from 72% all the way down to 42%, and a large majority of offices were underused.

The team at Standard Chartered Bank set out to answer the following questions with data (and Dataiku): 

• How do we reduce the overall property cost and stop it from being so high that it impacts the profitability of the bank?
• How do we reduce capital wasted on unused or underused empty space?
• How do we reduce unnecessary carbon emissions by ensuring spaces are fully operational?
• How do we reduce space without negatively impacting the employee experience (i.e., enabling a sustainable hybrid model)?

They used Dataiku to develop the Space Planning and Optimization Tool (SPOT), which associates data from different systems, provides a single source of truth for analyzing data for space planning, and uses analytical techniques to determine the right amount of office space to answer the above questions.

Using this solution, the team at Standard Chartered Bank ultimately will reduce their property portfolio by 700,000 square feet by 2028 to achieve a 34-million-dollar reduction in annual property cost, helping the bank to improve its overall profitability as measured by Return on Tangible Equity (RoTE).

“Dataiku was the key platform to solve the problems related to data sourcing and data preparation. It enabled association, modeling, and transformation of data to develop a purpose-built data store for performing space planning analysis.”

A Collaborative Solution for Data Transformation & Portfolio Recommendations

Relationship managers (RMs) engaging wealth management clients need up-to-date portfolio details for a productive engagement, to present an accurate picture of which investment avenues are making a profit, and to pass on relevant investment advice.

However, it takes significant effort to collate relevant data from disparate systems, perform portfolio returns analysis, and identify top-performing assets. This is a time-consuming process, which limits the number of client engagements possible per RM.

Standard Chartered Bank used Dataiku to automate portfolio analytics with data from disparate systems. Plus, they extended this use case to the next logical step: recommending portfolio rebalancing to maximize ROI, tailored to the different risk appetites of the clients. 

“Relationship managers are able to have holistic investment conversations with clients, adding value by providing quicker and richer insights. With rebalancing recommendations personalized to clients’ risk appetites, RMs can focus on quality client engagement rather than spending time on upfront preparation.”

What’s Next for Standard Chartered Bank With Dataiku & Deloitte

Although they had successfully broken through size and speed engineering barriers and defined individual learning marathons (e.g., 100 days of code), the Standard Chartered Digital Center of Excellence (CoE) still largely acted as a startup development tribe. They had plateaued on their growth path and struggled to scale and accelerate to Everyday AI.

Dataiku and Deloitte have partnered to create a powerful combination of data science and analytics capabilities that will take Standard Chartered Bank to the next level through a comprehensive digital scaling program. 

In particular, Dataiku and Deloitte are helping the Standard Chartered Digital CoE to:

• Accelerate the development of data-driven solutions: Dataiku’s platform enables teams to quickly develop and deploy data-driven solutions, while Deloitte’s expertise ensures that the solutions are tailored to the specific needs of the teams.
• Leverage data to drive business outcomes: Dataiku and Deloitte help organizations to use data to identify opportunities, optimize processes, and make better decisions.
• Create a culture of data-driven decision-making (operational within CoE and how solutions are delivered to the customer): Dataiku and Deloitte create a culture of data-driven decision-making, where data is used to inform decisions and drive business outcomes.
• Unlock the value of data: Dataiku and Deloitte help to unlock the value of data by leveraging data science and analytics capabilities. Their approach to monetizing and maximizing the immediate capabilities of digital investments and assets enable the CoE to focus on accelerating time to value while ensuring innovation remains a key difference.