David Awcock, group head, technology, Standard Chartered Bank

Commencing his innings with Standard Chartered Bank in 1991, David Awcock, group head, technology, Standard Chartered Bank, has held responsibilities covering a wide range of technology needs across many business domains including consumer banking, commercial and institutional banking, and wholesale banking. He also led a major initiative to transform the bank's core banking systems across more than 50 territories of the bank in rolling out a next-generation J2EE, Linux based system, in a multi-year program. Awcock is now responsible for all technology services across the bank globally and is engaged in taking the bank's technology capabilities to the next level in support of the bank's growth. In a tete a tete with Dataquest, Awcock highlights 2011 as seen from the IT mirror and his future plans. Excerpts

How would you describe the challenges for the IT department with the rising use of social media?

Social media is a growing phenomenon, the impact of which is still to be determined or fully understood. Currently, we have adopted a careful approach by restricting staff access to external social media sites in office premises using our network.

This is due to the high degree of confidentiality that we owe to customers and clients and the need to ensure that data privacy is not compromised. However we have created internal social and collaborative networks, where staff can engage for business and other purposes such as organizing volunteering activities, etc.

We have deployed various security techniques to allow staff to use smartphones and iPads for business and personal use. We have achieved that by using 'sandboxing' techniques to separate access and ensure proper use of virtual private network and firewalls managed by security certificates.

 

We are working hard to ensure that we strike the right balance of confidentiality and risk management, while allowing the users to use their own or devices given by the bank when not in office premises.

 

What is your approach to social media with your customers?

On the customer and client front, increasing efforts are being made to understand how social media can be leveraged for business purposes. Separating the hype around social media, we are viewing it from a number of perspectives.

First, we are trying to gather a better understanding of customer opinion of the bank's services and products and act on opinions, concerns, and grievances. Second, we see opportunities to publicize, market, and build our brand, although again we have learnt from others' attempts that this needs to be done with care.

Third, we are seeking ways to leverage the medium to build our business over time by identifying opportunities and requirements that we can monetize- something that no one has yet done successfully in financial services.

 

Currently, we focus more on customer feedback aspects and have been running a pilot project in India.

By monitoring the social networks for commentary about the bank, we are using software and analytical tools to analyze and direct comments to appropriate staff within the bank who can deal with issues directly, or who can use the data to draw inferences and conclusions that help us service our customers better.

We want to use this information then, in a way that adds value for the bank to help our customers, and to build enduring relationships.

What are your learnings from 2011 and plans for 2012?

In 2011, we continued with our long-term technology strategy of providing cost-effective services for the bank that helped us provide a better customer experience, enabling us to be different, and achieve competitive advantage.

Overall, as a bank, we have outperformed with record results for 9 years consecutively. We have invested consistently in technology during this period and we consider that this investment has helped to underpin and shape our good performance.

One stronger focus area in 2012 will be to seek to build better value propositions around data and analytics. We want to optimize the value of the structured data we hold currently and use that better, together with insights we can gather from the vast amounts of unstructured data that is available now, both internally and externally, to understand our customers and their needs better and provide more targeted products and services over time.

We will also seek to manage this information better, reducing costs associated with data duplication and redundancy.

 

How would you describe the success of green IT and CSR initiatives at the bank?

Our stance is not to follow 'flavor of the season' initiatives. Since many years, we have focused on ensuring our data centers are efficient whether that is through specific power initiatives or virtualization opportunities. We eliminated the use of paper by digitization and have also reduced the number of printing devices we use.

When we consider initiatives, we take into consideration the context of the economics of the whole proposition and the opportunities particularly to do things without adversely impacting the environment or the societies in which we operate.

On the CSR front, we are very proud of the in-house system we have developed called 'EOPs'. This is an initiative that is providing local employment opportunities to around 40 women at a rural BPO in Masinagudi, Tamil Nadu, and has the potential to be used more widely crossing the borders of India.

Essentially, it is a software system that anonymizes customer information completed on application forms, so that digitization through data entry can be done remotely and online by anyone with reasonable typing skills.

It overcomes data confidentiality issues that previously forced us only to do this type of work in-house.

The other benefit is that this system is not limited to financial services use and we are engaging with other parties to license the use of the software for use in other fields too. This system recently won a prestigious award-'Social Innovation: Market Facing Innovation at Nasscom Innovation Awards 2012'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would you describe smartphones as the flavor of the season?

We don't consider smartphones as the flavor of the season. They are here to stay. Our strategy can be traced back to 2009, when we decided to adopt the iPhone for internal use phasing out the use of BlackBerry. Today, we have more than 10,000 iPhones in use by staff and we have also enabled more than 3,000 iPads.

We have built an internal ecosystem that allows us to provide our own app center where internal apps can be downloaded safely and securely and these apps cover a wide number of 'on-the-go' applications for the staff to use.

We are adopting a similar approach with our customers for products and services we provide to them, but here we do cater to a wide variety of other smartphones.

Although for apps and data use, iPhone is still the device to opt for, with other smartphones still to catch on our footprints.