This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 22, 2022 - August 28, 2022
Banks no longer only serve as intermediaries between depositors and borrowers but also function as facilitators and partners today, especially where businesses are concerned.
Over the years, banking institutions have been working on addressing the digital gap, particularly in the Asean region, guiding businesses through their digital transformation journey, says Samuel Ding, country head of transaction banking at Standard Chartered Malaysia.
To accelerate digitalisation, banks such as Standard Chartered leverage technology to transform various angles of their business and client offerings.
One of the areas that banks are increasingly focusing on is digital advisory beyond financial consultations. This is because banks understand each client’s processes and pain points, and can suggest suitable technology that can be implemented for their businesses to grow, says Ding.
“Banks have the capital, compliance and clients’ trust — with technology in place, we can drive efficiencies, weather the storm and redefine value to clients in a shifting market,” he explains.
Contrary to popular belief, digitalisation is less about technology with financial pressures, economic uncertainty, bureaucracy and reluctance to adopt new ways of working.
“[Instead,] it’s about mindset, as it can be difficult to think differently when people are enmeshed in the day-to-day business, caught up in the legacy processes, technologies and ways of thinking,” says Ding.
The availability of infrastructure and efficient logistics and payment are also defining factors because there are wide disparities in digital infrastructural development, particularly in Asia.
To address disparities, banks are beginning to adopt multiple roles to better assist clients. “With payments being a key building block of business transactions and the multitude of payment methods available in various countries, solutions such as our global digital collections gateway enables businesses to work with us as their ‘one-stop shop’ to accept a variety of payment options from their customers, all through a single platform,” says Ding.
Standard Chartered helps clients consolidate payments with Straight2Bank, its global digital collections gateway. The Straight2Bank suite of electronic channels enable clients to securely and effectively run their cash management, trade finance, foreign exchange and securities services.
Users can choose between using paper payment methods such as cheques and demand draft, and electronic payment methods such as account transfer, real time gross settlement system (RTGS) or RENTAS, and telegraph transfer. Transactions can be entered manually or by uploading a file.
Straight2Bank currently supports more than 300,000 users globally and processes more than five million payments a month across cash, trade and securities services.
Standard Chartered is also integrated with PayNet on all retail payments platform (RPP) payments and collections products and also supports all payment types on Swift for cash and trade.
“We invest heavily in the e-commerce space and provide consistent and scalable solutions for online collections, escrow accounts, QR codes and automated liquidity management tools,” says Ding.
Standard Chartered comes up with such solutions by working like a fintech. The bank also partners with other fintech companies to tap into their knowledge, typically in an internal sandbox environment, for about half a year.
The technology will be tested for two to three weeks in a safe environment. If it turns out to be viable and reasonable, it will then be integrated into Standard Chartered’s operations.
“We then opt to either use the company’s services or take an investment stake in them, which is what we did with blockchain start-up Ripple, information management company Paxata, and cash distribution startup, soCash,” says Ding.
To help businesses improve their digital capabilities, Standard Chartered is hosting the Standard Chartered Digital Showcase on Aug 23 at The Westin Kuala Lumpur.
“Our upcoming showcase is intended not only to create awareness among businesses on these solutions, but also to help them find the right tools to digitalise for better insights and more efficient operations,” Ding says.
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