Standard Chartered Turbo Charges Open Banking Capabilities

Standard Chartered is turbo charging its open banking capabilities, with a focus on driving innovation and technology culture through openness and partnerships with developers, corporations and fintechs to co-create better client products and services through the sharing and use of Application Programming Interface (APIs).

The bank announced three new initiatives aimed at the developer community:

·         aXess Platform 

The aXess platform (https://axess.sc.com/) will offer developers open access to the Bank’s open source code for banking products and its APIs, applications, and libraries. It serves as an adaptive layer in its technology architecture to drive more connectivity and partnerships between developers, corporations and fintechs, so innovative solutions can be co-created.

·         aXess Labs

The Bengaluru-based test lab is a physical space where the Bank’s in-house developers can experiment with cutting edge technologies, accelerate ideation to service delivery, enable new business models, and share open banking best practices, capabilities, and tools across the Bank.

·         aXess Academy

The developer academy aims to upskill the Bank’s developers with the technical skills required for open banking through training programmes, hackathons, and technology leadership roundtables. It is also a forum for networking with tech networks in other industries.

Dr Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer of Standard Chartered said: “Open banking is about putting more choices in the hands of our clients. They can decide what data they want to share, increasing their options of suitable services or products and how they are delivered. From the Bank’s perspective, this also opens many opportunities, because we can now offer banking services through other platforms which are already integrated in our clients’ lives, whether its social media or ecommerce, for example. This connectivity is made possible through APIs.”

Dr Sebastian Wedeniwski, the Bank’s Chief Technology Strategist said: “The future of banking is changing fast with massive technology-led innovations. Our aXess initiatives to boost our open banking capabilities aims to enhance the developer experience and upskill the technology expertise of the Bank, while guiding developers on our journey to build for openness and integration.”

Standard Chartered has been driving innovation in the banking space, co-creating solutions to improve client experience and establishing new partnerships and solutions to change how it approaches and thinks about banking. Following the successful pilot launch of its digital retail bank in Côte d’Ivoire last year, the Bank has further rolled out digital-only retail banks across Africa this year, in Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya. Most recently, the Bank announced the establishment of a strategic joint venture with PCCW, HKT and Ctrip Finance to deliver a new standalone digital retail bank in Hong Kong. It also recently announced the SC Ventures Fintech Bridge, a market-first online platform, through which the bank seeks partnerships with fintechs to solve business challenges which meet current and future client needs. It will soon be launching an open digital platform for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in India, to help them grow by providing access to a range of financial and business solutions.