Standard Bank + Celonis

Standard Bank uses Celonis Process Intelligence to transform CIB Operations – from optimizing cross border payments to enabling transparency, AI, and automation.

Standard Bank is the largest bank on the African continent. With business in more than 20 countries the bank always seeks ways to be a major driver of African growth. “Africa has the youngest population and the largest population globally. The opportunity is immense and we want to be part of enabling its growth,” says Richard de Roos, Standard Bank’s Head of CIB Operations.

But, as with many banks, changing customer expectations and growing competition from other financial services providers put Standard Bank under pressure. “Some of the key challenges which banks face is the fact that they were born analog,“ says de Roos. “While digitization occurred, we were digitizing old processes… rather than rethinking and reimagining ourselves as a digital provider of services.”

To compete at the forefront of digital services and AI, Standard Bank wanted to ‘radically transform CIB Operations’. To do so, the bank had to unlock and understand a huge amount of data. The main question was how.

That’s where Celonis and ProcessLab come in.

Main roadblock: poor visibility preventing optimization

Standard Bank already had some ideas about pain points – such as long processing times for payments. But the bank had a difficult time understanding and fixing what was causing them. “We didn't have an end-to-end view of our processes and we couldn’t understand which connected processes are impacting a product or client,” remembers Mosotho Moloi, Head of Process Engineering at Standard Bank.

That was when ProcessLab entered the scene. Werner Horn, founder and CEO of ProcessLab knows the ins and outs of process management like no one else. An accountant turned consultant, Horn has helped many companies to optimize their processes. When he learned about Celonis, he saw how it could help “identify and quantify optimization opportunities for clients”. Horn founded ProcessLab to focus on consultancy based on Process Intelligence. Standard Bank became his first client.

Solving cross border payments

Standard Bank started with its biggest painpoint: cross-border payments. “Payments are the lifeblood of banks,” says de Roos. “But our cross-border strategy was prevented by too many components, too many fragmented initiatives within the business, within the industry.”

William Kent, Head of Payment and Trade Operations at Standard Bank, adds: “Standard Bank processes between 9 and 11 trillion rand worth of their value of cross-border payments on a monthly basis… so solving the problems we have in cross-border payments will have a meaningful impact both for the bank and the communities that we actually support.”

The analogue history of banking means the majority of the cross-border payment process is executed manually and in legacy systems. This made it hard for Standard Bank to get to the bottom of inefficiencies – and ended up causing processing times of up to 55 hours.

Time to change that. Supported by ProcessLab, Standard Bank created a digital twin of its cross-border payment process inside Celonis. “We immediately found friction points all over the place,” remembers Kent. “But we also saw how fixing just one or two things would improve the performance dramatically.”

Thanks to Celonis, Standard Bank reduced turnaround times to ‘a handful of hours’ and increased the STP rate to over 90%. Business need proven, Standard Bank moved onto a more wide-ranging transformation initiative.

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https://videos.celonis.com/watch/iEMqknmRVsEwW6j9SKPGn3

Transformation powered by process intelligence

With clear proof of the power of Process Intelligence, de Roos put Celonis at the center of the CIB Operations transformation: “We call this method ‘IPM’ – intelligent processing model – and it involves a number of components underlined by Celonis as our single vendor.”

Process Intelligence now enables and drives targeted optimization across a large variety of the bank’s portfolio, from payments to trade products and investment banking. At the headquarters in Johannesburg, Kent has put up large screens across the office so every employee can see how their processes perform in near real-time. “We see a massively collaborative environment emerging thanks to this new visibility,” says Kent.

The team has spread Celonis and its transformative impact far and wide. Standard Bank can now look at connected processes to understand how they impact CIB Operations performance. Standard Bank is now set to expand Process Intelligence even further.

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https://videos.celonis.com/watch/Y64XGAsszVHtQbYbk2uAQk

The vision: banking at the edge of technology

Thanks to the massive success in CIB Operations, other parts of the bank have started to take notice and want to be part of the IPM model. Moloi is currently working to expand Celonis to the client-facing side of the Finance section of the bank, with others soon to follow.

Standard Bank is also actively expanding on the technology side. With support from ProcessLab, AI features such as annotations and co-pilots are being rolled-out to further boost visibility and optimization.

“Celonis is part of how we run the business,” says de Roos. “It allows us to leapfrog into the future and to compete with best-practice fintechs globally.”