Making a Difference

Standard Chartered Continues Groundbreaking Work in Asia

BEST BANK FOR CASH & LIQUIDITY MANAGEMENT

Asia Pacific

BEST BANK FOR TRADE & FSCM

Asia Pacific

As a leading player in Asia, great things are expected of Standard Chartered, yet it still has the capacity to deliver surprises, as its success in TMI Awards 2020 shows. Here’s why the bank won Asia’s Best Bank for Cash & Liquidity Management, and Best Bank for Trade & Financial Supply Chain, as well an accolade in the Best Covid-19 Response category. Also noteworthy is Standard Chartered’s work with its client Bharti Airtel, which was highly commended in TMI’s Corporate Awards for Best API Project.

Standard Chartered has strengthened its market-leading position in cash and liquidity management through solutions such as its new scalable payment processing platform, launched in Hong Kong. This can sustain a peak load of 150 transactions per second with zero downtime for transaction processing.

In China, Standard Chartered has established more than 100 corporate cross-border cash pools across PBOC and SAFE schemes as of September 2020. It was also the first to offer Shanghai Free Trade Zone cash pools and a fully functional cash-sweeping scheme. In addition, the bank has a leading-edge digital ASEAN proposition, integrating a comprehensive value-added solution with its Straight2Bank (S2B) solution. This is outstanding work for which TMI proudly awards the Best Bank for Cash & Liquidity Management: Asia Pacific accolade to Standard Chartered.

Fostering innovation

The TMI judges were also impressed that the bank never rests on its laurels. Recent developments include its Faster Payment System for Hong Kong Council of Social Service (HKCSS), a joint programme helping to rapidly disburse around $5.16m (HKD 40m) in donations, supporting some 4,000 rent payments during the Covid-19 pandemic. This solution is the worthy recipient of the 2020 Covid-19 Innovation Award for Corporates ‘Highly Commended’ accolade.

Supplier sustainability

Standard Chartered continues to strengthen its market-leading position in supply chain financing too. With key client propositions such as its advisory services and structured trade financing with one-stop banking services, multi-country capabilities for trade financing, and of course its disruptive technology, it’s no wonder that by H1 2020, the bank’s Asia ecosystem revenues grew by +14% year-on-year.

And new solutions keep coming. Standard Chartered is reinforcing supplier sustainability through Vendor Prepay (VPP), an electronic supplier finance solution. VPP, which runs on the Infor Nexus cloud supply-chain platform for client PUMA International Trading, has the flexibility to include pre-shipment financing, enabling suppliers to access funding at competitive rates earlier in the procurement process.

Meanwhile, Standard Chartered’s ‘Trade Go Digital’ solution is helping Nissan Group submit more than 200,000 import/export documents by linking customs authorities’ data with bank-held payments/collections data.

Never one to shy away from the cutting edge, Standard Chartered Hong Kong became the first bank to issue a blockchain-based RMB-denominated letter of credit using R3 Corda on the Contour platform. This involved an RMB100m iron ore import by client Bao-Trans in Hong Kong from Rio Tinto in Singapore.

Standard Chartered clearly understands the importance of banking its clients’ ecosystem by supporting end-to-end flows of a client’s supply chain, from pre-shipment to post-shipment supplier financing. Winning TMI’s 2020 award for Supply Chain Financing: Asia Pacific is a natural progression.

Co-creation in action

Elsewhere, the bank has been busy creating an innovative solution for part of the Bharti Airtel global telecommunications services company, Airtel Kenya. The latter’s Airtel Money mobile wallets are operated through a network of agents. Manual allocation of Airtel Money e-value when agents credit funds to Airtel’s account was tedious, bound by business working hours (both the bank’s and Airtel’s), not tamper-proof, and generally inefficient.

A programme was set up to integrate the internal systems of Airtel and Standard Chartered via an application programming interface (API). This now offers real-time credit notification of deposited funds to Airtel systems, and subsequently auto-allocates e-value from Airtel’s systems to the mobile wallet of its agents.

By facilitating the shift from batch to real-time processing, the solution not only provides real-time information to Airtel’s treasury team, but also, by integrating with Airtel’s systems, Standard Chartered can deliver real-time feeds to Airtel Kenya for each payment. This, in turn, immediately triggers an automatic transfer of e-value to an agent’s wallet without the need for any user or operator action. It also makes the partners worthy winners of the award for Best API Project: Highly Commended.

“I am extremely proud that Standard Chartered has been honoured as Asia’s Best Bank for Cash & Liquidity Management as well as Best Bank for Trade & Financial Supply Chain in the TMI Awards for Innovation and Excellence 2020,” says Michael Spiegel, Global Head, Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered.

He continues: “This combination distinguishes us as the leading transaction bank in Asia. In addition, the accolades for delivering an innovative client API project and for Best Covid-19 Response are particularly meaningful given the exceptional year – and are a testimony to our strong transaction banking proposition upon which we build innovative and relevant client solutions.”