Asia Awards 2021: Best IT team—Standard Chartered Bank

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in companies worldwide having to significantly increase and improve their remote working capabilities and to do so at speed. Standard Chartered Bank rose to the challenge and its approach sees it collect the award for best IT team.

When the pandemic hit, 85% of Standard Chartered’s employees had to shift from working in offices to remote locations. This presented a number of challenges. For instance, only 10% of employees had access to video conferencing capabilities.

Pre-pandemic, Standard Chartered had already commenced its Our Digital Workplace initiative, a multi-year project to enable greater mobility, productivity and collaboration. As countries were forced into lockdown, it radically adjusted its plans and priorities. The bank boosted core foundations, deployed the evergreen Windows 10 desktop and increased network bandwidth and VPN connections.

It also delivered multiple digital tools, such as digital whiteboards and video conferencing for all. Notably, there was also a sharp focus on customer experience with ongoing monitoring of customer feedback, with a view to driving continual improvement.

The result is that over five months, 85,000 employees across 60 countries were digitally enabled, allowing them to collaborate seamlessly with each other and serve customers with minimum disruption.