Standard Chartered is embarking on a transformative journey within financial services, with a unique approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that prioritises talent and strategic implementation. The bank sees enabled capability and AI-enabled talent across the organisation as critical for future job safety and overall enablement.

This strategic integration hinges on three core aspects: discovery, management, and application of AI. Discovery involves understanding where, what, why, and how AI can be leveraged.

Management focuses on how AI gets incorporated within the process and embedded through an augmentation-based approach. Finally, application ensures specificity.

Ultimately, the application of AI within financial services aims to achieve three key objectives: risk mitigation, operational efficiency, and revenue generation.

Setting itself apart from other financial institutions, Standard Chartered has established four unique pillars guiding its AI strategy globally.

The first is the AI Safety Watchtower, which moves beyond standard compliance to view AI from an end-to-end perspective, ensuring harm mitigation and innovation with a deliberate intent for safety.

Secondly, the bank adopts a non-financial approach to sustainability for AI development. This ensures AI becomes an integral, continuous part of operations, rather than just a ‘one-hit wonder’.

The third pillar involves creating an AI assembly line, designed to ensure all process steps are known, allowing for replicability and reusability of AI solutions across the organisation.

Finally, a skill sets first initiative underscores the importance of people, capabilities, and talent as enabling elements within the AI process. This commitment to human capital is foundational.

Success will be measured by both qualitative and quantitative impacts. Qualitative improvements include a superior way of interacting with information, while quantitative metrics involve scaling processes from thousands to hundreds of thousands of applications while maintaining quality. The ultimate goal is to ‘make banking invisible’ to the customer.

Regarding the common concern of AI eliminating jobs, Standard Chartered maintains that tasks will be automated, but jobs will not. This leads to ‘natural augmentation,’ where AI enhances human capabilities by providing better information utilisation. To counter the industry’s talent crunch, the bank heavily invests in internal talent enablement, certification, and capabilities, recognising that simply hiring from the market is often unrealistic given the abundance of new tasks emerging.

About the speaker

David R. Hardoon
AI Senior Executive
Standard Chartered

David R. Hardoon is a seasoned AI senior executive with over 22 years of experience in data and artificial intelligence. As Global Head of AI Enablement at Standard Chartered, he advances the bank’s AI-driven finance ambitions. Notably, at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), he spearheaded AI strategy for the financial sector and established pioneering Fairness, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency (FEAT) principles. Dr Hardoon also founded Aboitiz Data Innovation, expanding its operations and revenue. He is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London, active in computational statistics and machine learning.

5W1H summary

Answers to common Google searches

1. What is Standard Chartered’s strategy for AI and talent in financial services?

Standard Chartered, through David Hardoon’s leadership, views talent as the core pillar for enabling capability and AI-enabled talent as critical for job safety and organisational enablement. Their approach to AI involves three key aspects: discovery (understanding where, what, why, and how AI can be used), management (how AI gets incorporated and embedded through augmentation), and application (specificity). The ultimate goals for Standard Chartered in financial services are risk mitigation, operational efficiency, and revenue.

2. How does Standard Chartered’s AI approach differ from other banks?

Standard Chartered believes its approach is unique due to four specific pillars. These include:

• AI Safety Watchtower: Going beyond compliance and responsible AI to an end-to-end view of AI implications, focusing on harm mitigation and innovation with deliberate intent of assuring safety.
• Non-Financial Approach: Despite being a financial institution, they take a non-financial approach to ensure AI is sustainable within the organisation, avoiding “one hit wonders”.
• AI Assembly Line: Creating a system to assure all process steps for replicability and reusability of AI solutions.
• Skill Sets First Initiative: Emphasising that “we are our people. We are capabilities. We are talent,” and ensuring those capabilities and enabling elements are part of the process.

3. How is the success of AI implementation measured in financial services?

Success in AI implementation is measured by the underlying impact, which includes both qualitative and quantitative aspects.

• Qualitative impact involves observing process improvements, superior interaction with information (e.g., through the use of GPT), and enhanced quality.
• Quantitative impact is measured by the ability to handle a significantly higher volume of applications at the same quality level, such as increasing from 1,000 to 10,000 or 100,000 applications. The ultimate goal is “delighting the customer” and making “banking invisible”.

4. What is the impact of AI on jobs and tasks?

The sources indicate that tasks will be automated, but jobs won’t be. AI is incorporated into current activities to drive transformation and reshape the “job of the future”. This requires an assessment of tasks, categorising them by repeatable aspects, thinking, quality assurance, and verifications. This assessment helps to understand how to create natural augmentation, where AI allows users (employees and consumers) to have a better lens in using and utilising information. Tasks, roles, and jobs naturally evolve over time.

5. How are organisations addressing the “talent crunch” for AI-enabled capabilities?

Organisations are facing a significant “talent crunch” for talent-enabled capabilities. Standard Chartered is addressing this by spending a lot of time on enablement of talent internally, as well as through certification and capabilities development. They recognise that simply trying to onboard talent from the market is “quite frankly unrealistic”. Their approach involves bringing capabilities and “training the trainer”, as there are “many more tasks to be done”.

Interview transcript

In your new role at Standard Chartered, you will likely have a lot of interest in your work. What role do you see for yourself, and how do you see your initiatives gaining traction? It has been an absolute pleasure.

Obviously, many things need to be done across an organization, but the first and core pillar of anything is ultimately talent. We see the necessity of having enabled capability and AI-enabled talent across the organization as critical for ensuring job safety moving forwards and enablement. To do that effectively, there are three things: discovery, management, and application.

• Discovery: We cannot presume AI will simply make everything great; it requires understanding where, what, why, and how.
• Management: This involves how AI gets incorporated within the process and embedded through an augmentation-based approach.
• Application: This focuses on specificity because, as an organization providing financial services, success boils down to risk mitigation, operational efficiency, and revenue.

Many banks are adopting AI. What makes Standard Chartered different?

Standard Chartered has four pillars that make it unique within the global industry:

• AI Safety Watchtower: This goes beyond compliance and responsible AI. The concept is to view AI from an end-to-end perspective regarding its implications, ensuring the right actions are taken and harm is mitigated by innovating with a deliberate intent to assure safety.
• Non-financial Approach to Sustainability: Even as a financial institution, Standard Chartered is taking a non-financial approach to make AI sustainable within the organization. It’s not about a “one-hit wonder” of AI, but integrating it so it becomes an integral part of operations, similar to how typist departments evolved.
• AI Assembly Line: Standard Chartered is creating an AI assembly line to ensure all process steps are known, allowing for replicability and reusability.
• Skill Sets First Initiative: This approach prioritizes people, capabilities, and talent, ensuring that these enabling elements are part of the process.

How will you measure your success, and how will you know all of this is coming to fruition? Success will eventually be measured in terms of the underlying impact, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative impacts.

• Qualitative Impact: For example, with the recent uses of GPT, it’s not about a 5% efficiency gain. Instead, it’s about the process and how tasks are done, making the way one interacts with information candidly superior. This is qualitative in nature and requires keen observation.
• Quantitative Impact: Standard Chartered is able to measure a process that currently takes an hour for a thousand applications and scale it to 10,000 or 100,000 applications while maintaining the same quality assurance. This aims to ‘delight the customer’ or, more practically, to make banking invisible, meaning the service is seamlessly provided for day-to-day use.

Regarding the current issues with AI taking jobs, your interview in Esquire eloquently stated that tasks will be automated, but jobs will not. Given your new role, how many tasks are yet to be automated at Standard Chartered?

There are two stages to this:

• Broad perspective on AI and jobs: When thinking about AI, it’s not just about roles themselves but how AI gets incorporated into current work, how transformation will happen, and what the job of the future effectively is.
• Task assessment for automation: This involves understanding specific tasks, such as repeatable aspects, thinking, quality assurance, or verifications. This type of assessment is necessary because tasks, roles, and jobs naturally evolve over the years. Once these assessments are complete, it allows for the creation of natural augmentation. AI ultimately provides end-users—both employees and consumers—with a better lens for using and utilizing information, which is the initial understanding that enables the next level of use and adoption.

We are always seeing a talent crunch, with a lot of talk about tech companies hiring indiscriminately. This implies that if highly sought-after talent is onboarded and some tasks are automated, they will simply be given new tasks. Is that correct?

Very much so. One of the reasons Standard Chartered invests heavily in internal talent enablement, certification, and capabilities is precisely due to the talent crunch. Everyone is seeking talent-enabled capabilities, making it unrealistic to simply onboard new talent from the market. Therefore, the approach involves both bringing in new capabilities and ‘training the trainer’. There are indeed many more tasks to be done.

Background Briefing Transcript:

We are obviously going past the initial hype cycle and disengaging from the AI ecosystem. We believe the valuations have increased significantly and we believe the next thing that is coming along the line is quantum computing. Let me paint you a picture. You wake up tomorrow morning and your bank and your account and your data has been completely hacked. You are freaking out. You do not know what to do. You realize all banks around the world have faced a similar problem. It is not because of a cyber threat, but it is because of a quantum threat. Therefore, we believe it is imperative for us to move into the quantum computing ecosystem because this is going to become fundamental for the way we protect data, the way we protect communities and the way we protect you.

What actually is Standard Chartered doing in order to build these protections?

We are essentially moving into partnering with some of the market leaders by co-investing into joint ventures. We are doing this because we understand that we would not be the ones building quantum computers, but there are ample companies that are leading the space and the market in this context. In order for us to bring financial services closer to that ecosystem, we need to find the best partners to be able to do that. We also recognize that by doing this, we are able to give rise to new companies and new startups that we were not able to do before. That is what we are doing, investing with other partners in completely different industries on a cross-industry basis.

What is Standard Chartered doing differently from others?

To the extent that I am aware, a lot of other banks and financial institutions are investing in the space. We are the only ones building the space and that is what I believe differentiates us from the pack because we not just invest but we also build and learn and absorb accordingly and protect your information.

Along those lines, what are the KPIs that you would have to bring to such investments and partnerships?

KPIs are similar to what we would say in the startup ecosystem. Is it viable, is it desirable and is it feasible? If you can demonstrate this in the next 12 months, then we will continue investing in these startups that we are creating. If it is not, we would disengage and kill them quickly.