Kahina Van Dyke has ambitious goals for London-based Standard Chartered Bank: she wants to turn it into the largest fintech in the 50 countries in which it operates and let its large, multinational customers see and manage all their money globally from one dashboard.
Van Dyke, who is global head of digital channels and data analytics at the 160-year-old institution, has led a long list of tech projects at the $828 billion-asset firm this year, including the development of a single core banking platform that works in more than 40 markets, the launch of data dashboards that were co-created with clients, the rollout out of digital self-service portals, the introduction of a new mobile app and the launch of open banking using application programming interfaces.
Before joining Standard Chartered, Van Dyke, who works from the bank’s Singapore office, was at Facebook and Ripple. In a recent interview, she explained how she is leading the “global digitization” of Standard Chartered.
You have led many tech projects over the past year. Which ones are you most proud of?
KAHINA VAN DYKE: The one thing I'm most proud of is I set forth the vision of a significant investment, but I hired 800 engineers and 300 business people. That has been the engine and the momentum that has transformed everything.
The hardest job in banking is to transform a traditional bank. And the reason I feel qualified is because I'm at that point where I have led so many different transformation projects and change management projects in traditional banking, in tech, in fintech, it feels very natural to me. I've been able to hire a great leadership team and we've been able to do great things, but it is about scaling. It's no longer about what I can do. It's about how do I enable other leaders, whether it's my chief data officers doing data architecture and quantum computing and data science, or it's my client experience head or it's my platform and innovation head or it's my chief operating officer tying all those pieces together into a singular mission. That’s the art that's leadership. It's giving people simple clarity about how they fit into that vision and then enabling them and sometimes fighting for them when you have to.
Can you give me a sense of what that mission is?
I have this audacious, crazy ambition. Standard Chartered is a 160-year-old colonial bank. We just had our official, 1000-page biography published in September. It was founded by the British colonists who were colonizing Asia and Africa. So the footprint of Standard Chartered is really unique in that we operate on the ground in 50 countries. We don't have a home market. So it's a completely dispersed model. It’s also fragmented and expensive to operate.
The vision that I see Standard Chartered serving is to transform it from a 160-year-old colonial bank to the largest fintech in emerging markets. To do that, we have to deliver a technology platform that is digital first, that is driven by client experiences, that is automated onboarding, servicing, decisioning, all of those things where in the old world, you just hired people in the call centers, in the operational centers. I want to be like Uber. We offer core services in 50 countries. I want us to offer the same experience, whether you're in Rwanda or Hong Kong. Localization happens of course with language and with regulation, but it's 85% the same platform model. So I'm trying to transform this colonial bank with this amazing network into a fintech platform.
When you came to the bank, were there 50 different tech stacks?
There were 30.
That's a lot. Are you having to throw out a lot of old stuff and then install a brand new platform that spans all 50 countries?
The good news is that the way we had architected the global business is that the core architecture was actually pretty centralized. So we had the product architecture. The problem is that in our middleware and in our front end, every country had customized their front end and therefore all their connectivity. And then you're reconciling across different front ends and middleware and that’s where errors happen. In a project called Harmony, we're harmonizing everyone onto a singular platform and we've migrated 90% of our clients. So we are well on the way. This year we'll be done completely. At the same time, we've also done the architecture work with the data lakes. You can't have 25 different data lakes. And we've moved to the cloud, we've launched digital servicing, we've launched a mobile app in 48 countries. So we've been doing client-facing work as we've also been architecting a more centralized platform for delivery and to increase performance.
Have any specific technologies helped you in this work?
The move to cloud was a big shift. That helped open up APIs and open banking ecosystems for us. For clients who wanted to have direct connectivity to us, we were able to create an API portal and marketplace where they could come in and find what they needed. Without cloud, that would have been very difficult to do. So I think the combination of open banking APIs and cloud was really fundamental.
The standardization of platforms was another. We have a lot of very big, multinational clients in the U.S. and Europe who use Standard Chartered as their bank to reach all these countries that their primary bank can't. We didn't want a customer in the UK to see one thing, and a subsidiary in the Philippines to see something completely different.
Data dashboards are a third important technology. So empowering your frontline people, your relationship managers to make decisions with information at their fingertips, but then also empower your clients with dashboards about their information so that they can make better decisions.
Do you mean dashboards for business clients that would show them their cash flow and such?
Yes, that show them where their working capital is going, that provide cash forecasting and payment flows. And also giving notifications to clients. All of a sudden my client’s on their mobile app and I can say, Hey, you have something to approve and you might want to look a little bit deeper on your latest update. We've just updated your forecasting model. These are all ways to help the corporate and business clients focus on their business and let us be their smart digital concierge banker.
And do these clients typically have everything in your bank or do they have accounts at other banks, and if so are you able to provide visibility to those external accounts?
Multi-bank hasn't launched yet, but it's coming next quarter. It’s really important because we usually are not the singular primary bank for clients. The big multinational clients want to be able to see all of their accounts. And they want to be able to see all of their positions.
When you arrived at Standard Chartered, you inherited a team that had mostly male senior reports. And you increased the number of senior female reports to about 44%. How did you do that?
I'm used to all-male teams, because I've been in banking and technology for 25 years. So everywhere I go, I make a really conscious effort. I don't launch a diversity initiative. I just make it happen. And the first thing that I do is I tell recruiters, don't send me candidates unless it's a diverse slate, period. If they send me a list of five great guys, I say, okay, so now I want you to find an equal number of great women. That's probably been one of the most effective tools because it makes them dig deeper into their network and reconsider people that they put to the side. And the gender bias is so pervasive. Men are overestimated and women are underestimated consistently. The problem is that women are not being considered. Now, once you get the [diverse] list, the women are actually phenomenally qualified. They just haven't been considered. So we've been able to triple the number of [female] senior leaders, which to me is the pipeline for the future management team in the bank.
The other thing that was really important is we looked at every single person’s pay, not because we were asked to, not because there was some kind of report being done about us, we just looked at every single role to make sure that men and women doing the same job are paid the same, and where adjustments had to be made, they were made. And I can say that we have 100% pay equity at every single level on the team.
