Anju Patwardhan took up her role as the first chief innovation officer at Standard Chartered in July. And the move from risk to innovation was just a short hop, she tells Joy Macknight.

Standard Chartered appointed its first group chief innovation officer, Anju Patwardhan, at the beginning of July. Based in Singapore, she reports directly to the group chief information officer, Dr Michael Gorriz.

One of the first companies to set up innovation outposts in the Silicon Valley five years ago, Standard Chartered had pockets of employees across the globe working on different innovation projects. The bank decided that the time had come to consolidate those initiatives and create an innovation team.

Smooth transition

In her previous role as group head, risk innovation, Ms Patwardhan was already examining innovation from a credit, market and operational risk perspective, and this allowed for a smooth transition.

“The big change has been in my remit,” she says. “When looking at risk I wasn’t involved in areas such as wealth management, remote banking or payments, but of course people were working on new projects in those areas too. We want to put in place a collaborative environment and framework to ensure we share successes from across the organisation and learn from each others’ mistakes so as not to repeat them.”

The innovation team is focused on four main areas. First, it is exploring the use of emerging technologies and advanced data analytics to solve business problems and improve customer experience. Second, it is focused on thought leadership and industry trends. “We look at emerging trends and technologies in order to have an informed view on how to respond – for example, whether to get involved, have a watching brief or do nothing,” she says.

The third area is regulatory and industry engagement. Ms Patwardhan and her team engage with regulators in many countries, especially as a number are setting up financial technology and innovation teams themselves.

The fourth area is client engagement and support for other areas of the bank. For example, one team in the bank works on financial inclusion and impact investing. “Many technology companies, either directly or through their foundation organisations, are working in this arena. As an emerging markets bank, we are exploring ways with our impact investing team to better use technology to support financial inclusion outcomes including access to financial services for the unbanked,” she says.

Fostering innovation

Ms Patwardhan’s first objective is to develop an infrastructure conducive to innovation and rapid prototyping. “Similar to other large banks, our vendor on-boarding process and due diligence tends to be onerous. This can be a challenge for innovation projects, where the intent is to do proof of concept to evaluate the technology. So we are planning to create a sandbox environment in the bank that can support innovation,” she says. Additionally, her aim is to create greater innovation awareness within the organisation.

As part of her remit, Ms Patwardhan oversees SC Studios, the bank’s technology and innovation outpost and link to Silicon Valley, which was launched in 2010. “Most of our people are based in Singapore and London, not in the US, so SC Studios has helped to bridge the gap. On my first trip to Silicon Valley in the risk innovation role, I met 10 to 12 companies who were doing creative and innovative work with both banks and non-banks. SC Studios facilitated the introductions and engagement,” she says.

Ms Patwardhan believes it is a good time for banks to be exploring innovative solutions. “There are many opportunities for banks to collaborate with technology companies and other partners such as telcos and venture capital firms," she says. "Gone are the days where the main choice was to build a technology solution in house or buy it off the shelf and customise it for your markets. Today we can collaborate with companies whose core competence is building technology and systems relevant for multiple geographies and currencies. Although it still requires integration into our legacy systems, this can allow us to roll out new solutions much faster.”

On the radar

Ms Patwardhan recently commented on the potentially disruptive impact of blockchain technology on the financial services industry. “There is so much hype around [blockchain], so I wanted to demystify it," she says. "While potentially it has many different applications, such as in trade finance and financial markets, in the near term there are many challenges associated with it, such as scalability, legal, accounting, regulatory and taxation issues. So it’s not just the underlying technology but also the associated environment and ecosystem around it that needs to develop.”

Her team is also looking at the use of data science and advanced analytics, payments roadmap, digital identity and remote banking.

Standard Chartered recently partnered with a Silicon Valley company on advanced analytics to combat financial crimes including money laundering and improve cyber security. In addition, it is exploring a collateral monitoring solution. “We want to use the Internet of Things to better track our collateral from a commodities perspective,” she says.

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