Standard Chartered is deep into an enterprise-wide AI build, with the technology positioned as a fundamental driver of client value. Alvaro Garrido, chief operating officer, technology & operations and chief information officer, information security & data, said the strategy is anchored in governance and reuse — with wealth management and corporate banking among the first functions to see active deployment. “We see AI as a fundamental driver for creating client value. This is why we take a more targeted and intentional approach to AI, where innovation is built for business objectives, bolstered by a safety-first principle and with a commitment to human-led accountability,” said Garrido. He said the bank was deliberately prioritising quality over the volume of deployments, shifting the conversation from how much AI it deploys to how much value it delivers, with transversal use cases that can scale responsibly as the priority. The wider ecosystem — spanning people, process and infrastructure through AI talent and literacy programmes, research partnerships and safety frameworks — was being built in parallel with use case delivery. AI use cases span wealth, corporate banking and compliance “In wealth management and advisory, AI is helping our teams to deliver real-time insights and personalised services to our clients. In our corporate and investment business, we are seeing meaningful traction in using AI for lead prioritisation, client onboarding and deal preparation. AI is also benefiting our risk, compliance and fraud teams by improving detection accuracy, documentation and auditability,” said Garrido. The total number of AI use cases grew from 200 at the end of the first quarter (Q1) of 2025 to over 300 by Q1 2026, including over 30 GenAI use cases in production, Garrido said. AI Academy, a bank-wide learning platform, and AI Factory, a centralised platform for developing, deploying and governing AI solutions, support workforce capability alongside use case delivery. Governance through standardisation and an AI inventory Garrido explained that, as part of its AI operating model, the bank has dedicated units to facilitate the path to production. This includes teams that engage with businesses to workshop use cases, identifying those reusable or capable of generating transformational impact across multiple functions. A project management team ensures on-time delivery, working closely with AI solutioning and research teams for builds or prototype validation. An AI safety team oversees an end-to-end integrated governance framework, with domain specialists embedded across functions. “This allows us to develop and leverage a wide range of AI capabilities quickly, responsibly and in alignment with ethical global standards,” he said. “The key to balancing centralised platform and federated autonomy is through standardisation and organisational transparency.” The bank launched a global AI inventory covering live use cases and those in progress, giving teams a common repository to identify reusable components or technologies from other projects and to track governance workflows and approval status. In-house tools to drive enterprise-wide productivity SC GPT, the bank's first in-house GenAI tool, gives colleagues a chatbot interface where natural language prompts return answers, content generation, report summarisation, research, ideation and translation. "Our in-house GenAI tool SC GPT, which empowers global colleagues across nearly 50 markets, delivers an estimated 6% average productivity uplift among users," Garrido said. With a daily user base of over 15,300 colleagues, SC GPT is helping democratise foundational AI capabilities across the bank while preserving accountability through a human-in-the-loop model. The transaction banking team used SC GPT to produce code that analysed hundreds of legal documents, cutting manual copying time. The bank also has an enterprise search platform built on an in-house large language model for technical and developer-focused queries, which extends to non-developers for data analysis, data generation and cross-skill enablement. SC GPT further enabled a GenAI Client Engagement Email Assistant in the bank’s myWealth Advisor platform. “This allowed Investment Advisors to integrate existing myWealth insights and personalised ideas aligned to our chief investment office (CIO) house views into engaging emails for frontline users seamlessly,” Garrido said. “We have a new GenAI entity mapping tool that enabled a faster and more accurate deal preparation process for our frontline colleagues in corporate and investment banking. In another instance, we created a GenAI mortgage memorandum generator, which extracted information from hundreds of public documents and accelerated our mortgage loan approval process, shortening turnaround time from two days to under 10 minutes, even with human evaluation,” Garrido said. The generator uses AI-powered visual recognition and information extraction, allowing teams to work with condensed information while supporting risk analysis. “More than 33,000 colleagues have taken part in the learning offered by AI Academy since its launch in September 2025, while the AI-powered Talent Marketplace enables colleagues to upskill and unlock more internal opportunities. In 2025, internal deployment increased to 47.4%. This has saved $1.88 million and unlocked $1.75 million in productivity through Talent Marketplace,” Garrido added. AI Factory matures as the data platform takes shape “Last year, we launched our centralised AI platform AI Factory, which provides a library of micro-AI capabilities that enables our teams to create their own AI solutions,” he said. The platform gives teams a centralised hub with reusable components for agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), intelligent document processing (IDP) and machine learning (ML) model training and deployment. Shared capability layers, common patterns and reusable artefacts compress development cycles from months to weeks or days in some cases. Core capability layers are built once and consumed by multiple teams, with standardised CI/CD and MLOps pipelines, embedded governance controls and a secure production sandbox reducing deployment failures and operational overhead. The bank has been adding capabilities to AI Factory over time, based on demand from business teams. Garrido said the bank is developing a global data platform to support AI at scale. "As our legacy infrastructure relied on decentralised data lakes, we quickly realised the fragmented approach to data sourcing, processing and reporting would be unsustainable and costly moving forward," he said. The platform, he explained, would simplify and harmonise the bank's technology stack, accelerate delivery and reduce costs, while giving business units faster, more self-sufficient access to data in a compliant and secure way. AI strategic pillars anchor the next phase The bank plans to focus on developing a targeted and structured approach to AI, aligned with business objectives. Garrido said that looking ahead, the bank’s enterprise framework for industrialising AI anchors in safety and client centricity. “This includes the building of a single enterprise North Star; establishing measurements for AI fluency, accuracy and productivity; activating workforce capability with usage tracking and AI playbooks; staying accountable for platform capability as well as FinOps evolution; and operationalising risk management and transparency.” Standard Chartered is aligning its responsible AI governance with regulatory frameworks in Singapore and Hong Kong, and is a founding member of the UK Sovereign AI Industry Forum, a public-private collaboration chaired by NVIDIA to advance the UK's AI capabilities. The bank also participates in the Ignition AI Accelerator, a joint initiative with NVIDIA, Tribe and Digital Industry Singapore. Standard Chartered’s AI strategy is centred on enterprise reusability, governance and platform-led delivery. The next phase will depend on stronger evidence of measurable business outcomes at scale, particularly in revenue generation, client engagement and balance sheet impact.
