Standard Chartered has introduced an additional product vetting stage for new solutions in development to ensure they are compatible and suitable for emerging digital technologies.
Speaking at Money 20/20 USA on Sunday (26 October), the bank’s US and Americas CEO, Mandy DeFilippo, said the company believes that there is huge potential for AI tools and technology to transform processes and this move was a response to that.
“When we develop a new product, it goes through full governance and testing. We’ve added an extra layer to that process, with a dedicated AI council that vets and reviews the products we develop. We don’t treat AI as something off to the side.
“Banks and large financial institutions have a lot of data, and they’re required to do a lot with it, so the potential for AI tools and technology to transform those processes becomes obvious.”
DeFilippo said AI enhancements, from internal operations and risk analytics to client engagement and global access, are equivocal to new products, and therefore are treated as such.
You could have the best tool and the best technology, but it just may be that your data isn’t usable in that format,” DeFilippo said.
“Until we can work through it, that will hold back the advantages that we will get out of the [new] technology.”
The future of banking, and finance alike, as DeFilippo made clear, depends not just on deploying new tools, but on perfecting the data foundations that make them work.
Standard Chartered’s recent rollout of SC GPT, a proprietary generative AI platform, reflects the bank’s commitment to embedding AI directly into its operational core.
Developed under a rigorous governance framework and guided by ethical AI principles, the platform has been vetted by the aforementioned AI council.
SC GPT is already transforming risk analytics, client engagement, and internal processes, but its success hinges on the usability of the data it draws from, a challenge the bank is actively addressing.
