Standard Chartered
There are plenty of candidates for this award – The City Bank and Eastern Bank both have strong digital offerings and are installing upgrades to keep themselves ahead of the pack – but Standard Chartered is a cut above the rest in the digital world.
Bangladesh is still a mostly cash-based economy, but that is changing, and the better banks are tweaking or overhauling their systems to cater to the changing demands of retail and corporate customers.
Standard Chartered has integrated a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) solution into its internet banking platform – a useful addition for any client seeking to complete high-value, low-volume interbank payments – and was the first lender to process a payment through the central bank’s RTGS platform. It is working to digitize more of its cash management services, introducing a best-in-class account payables management systems to all of its corporate clients and upgrading its systems in order to process more than 100,000 transactions an hour.
In 2016, StanChart introduced a new smartphone-based mobile wallet aimed at boosting financial inclusion among the country’s underbanked and unbanked populace, and has joined forces with bKash, the country’s largest mobile financial services provider, to make it easier and cheaper for smaller Bangladeshi corporates to complete low-value, high-volume transactions.