Standard Chartered sets new standard in innovation with Dynamics 365

Standard Chartered is a leading international banking group headquartered in London, England. It has a presence in 53 of the world’s most dynamic markets and serves clients in an additional 64, employing nearly 85,000 people. With operations in consumer, corporate and institutional banking, and treasury services, it is a client-centric financial institution committed to offering innovative services to its clients.

“We aspire to enable the Bank to ‘Think Client’ by empowering our Sales and Marketing functions with data-driven insights and progressive technology using Microsoft Dynamics 365.”

Rajan Gupta, Global Head, Sales Enablement & Analytics Technology, Corporate & Investment Banking, Standard Chartered

In 2021, Standard Chartered’s Corporate & Investment Banking (CIB) division began a multi-year journey to digitize, automate, and streamline customer relationship management (CRM) in its marketing, sales, and service organizations. The project had two goals: improve CIB’s client engagement process and provide more personalized, targeted experiences for the division’s clients in the 67 countries in which CIB operates and unify all bank-wide content and information into a single source, equipped with intelligence to streamline processes and empower employees to deliver superior client-centered, data-driven experiences—all critical elements of industry leadership.

Standard Chartered wanted to improve its current technology with a modern, scalable, SaaS solution that was intelligent, intuitive, and would serve as the single source of truth to manage relationships and interactions with all CIB clients. This was a key milestone on Standard Chartered’s journey to improve and scale up management, measurement, and analysis of CIB client relationships and enable its more than 6,000 users to be more effective and productive.

The solution

Standard Chartered already had an in-house, on-premises CRM. The company needed to ensure it was adopting a solution that would introduce a step change, significantly improve user productivity and CRM, and outpace competitors. Crucially, the new solution had to be highly innovative, with rich, configurable capabilities to minimize the need for customization. Stakeholders needed robust, native functionalities that met their use cases whether it was deployed on-premises or online.

Dynamics 365 delivered.

Supporting the bank’s ethos to “think client,” the core capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights empower teams with data-driven insights and a single platform for the end-to-end sales journey. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights covers the end-to-end view of all marketing, regulatory outreach, and operational campaigns. This platform also provides tools to help sales teams collaborate seamlessly, generate insights and forecasts, and provide personalized recommendations. Combining sales and marketing applications on the same platform yields efficiencies across the organization, giving teams access to rich client profiles and identifying new opportunities that impact overall revenue and market share.

“Using technology to simplify, enhance, increase capabilities, and automate processes is a given in any transformational program. Our focus is to use those technological advantages to provide our CIB teams with a 'seamless' experience—from first steps in account planning to pipeline management to client outreach to closing the deal—all backed by Dynamics 365 to drive better decision-making.”

Daniel Hinds, Head of CRM and Sales Enablement, Corporate & Investment Banking, Standard Chartered

Impacts and benefits

With Dynamics 365, Standard Chartered enjoys a global solution that provides a seamless, single touch point for managing global client relationships and collaborating effectively across teams. The following are some of the benefits of the division’s transformation.

Sales effectiveness: Thinking of the system’s users first, the team focused on persona-based journeys and simplified many of the mandatory forms and fields required to perform tasks. In many cases, they achieved a significant reduction in data entry. Data cleanup eliminated most duplicated and outdated contacts, reducing work and making insights simpler and faster to glean.

Increased collaboration: To achieve the best collaboration and enhance sharing of valuable information, automated call reports—reports that document client engagement—are now easy to create and share in Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Teams integration with embedded voice and chat is planned to expand omnichannel collaboration and enhance efficiency.

Data-driven insights: Client Insights, the combination of news feeds and other information within Dynamics 365 and AI, is uncovering opportunities and enabling proactive engagement with clients. Another boost to effective communication will come soon with LinkedIn integration with Client Insights.

Looking ahead

Up next, Standard Chartered plans to adopt new AI capabilities to optimize client communications and enhance data quality using Microsoft Copilot for Sales.

With Dynamics 365 and a strong CRM ecosystem, Standard Chartered can scale and quickly deliver new technologies, utilize analytics and insights from external markets and internal knowledge, and make better use of the competitive advantage that comes with the company’s unique regional and global presence to deliver a powerful and distinctive value proposition to its clients.