Standard Chartered Bank, Deloitte - Unlocking the Value of Data and Driving Business Outcomes

CraigTurrell · June 2023

Name: Craig John Turrell

Title: Head of Digital CoE, Finance Analytics

Country: Singapore

Organization: Standard Chartered Bank

Standard Chartered Bank is a leading international banking group, with a presence in more than 70 countries and territories across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. It is one of the world’s most international banks, with a network of over 1,200 branches and outlets and a customer base of more than 87 million. Standard Chartered is committed to responsible banking and is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary initiative that encourages businesses to adopt sustainable and socially responsible practices.

Awards Categories:

Best Acceleration Use Case
Best Data Democratization Program
Best Approach for Building Trust in AI
Best Partner Acceleration Use Case

Business Challenge:

The Standard Chartered Digital CoE team's business problem was scale, ways of working, AI strategic roadmap, skilled AI team, and maximizing the 'now' {30,60,90 day delivery}.

Scale: Although the team had successfully broken through size and speed engineering barriers and defined individual learning marathons (100 days of code), we still acted as a 'start-up' development tribe. We had plateaued on our growth path and struggled to scale and accelerate to everyday AI.

Ways of Working: We have always emphasized the importance of agile software development, which focuses on collaboration, flexibility, and rapid delivery. But RAD / extreme program approach was not giving the business insights and transparency on how we managed an increasingly large engineering workforce and business-critical deliveries.

AI Strategic Roadmap: The team needed a comprehensive AI strategy that outlines the goals and objectives of the finance organization, the resources necessary to achieve those goals, and the timeline for implementation. We acquired and integrated the data needed and the Dataiku enterprise AI platform to support an AI strategy - we did not have direction.

Skilled AI Team: In past years, we have focused on data engineering, consumer database development, and user experience. But we now face the challenge of monetizing that investment through building and maintaining a skilled AI team, including recruiting and designing AI learning journeys, developing and maintaining a culture of innovation, and providing ongoing support and guidance.

Max the Now: We had a "split-personality" - focused mostly on what is going to happen in 90-180 or even 180-720 days from now. We expected the 'now,' e.g., the next 90 days just to happen efficiently and effectively, given our learning and platform engineering efforts. We were so focused on what going to happen next, that we forgot many times that value can be increased every day for every person - if you focus on the now. As Star Wars said -

Qui-Gon Jinn: Don't center on your anxieties, Obi-Wan. Keep your concentration here and now, where it belongs.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: But Master Yoda said I should be mindful of the future.

Qui-Gon Jinn: But not at the expense of the moment. Be mindful of the living Force, young Padawan.

From an AI viewpoint, we were still padawans and needed to find our Jedi master.

Business Solution:

Dataiku's Customer Success Manager and Deloitte (Dataiku partner) worked together to help Standard Chartered Digital COE overcome its business problems.

First, Dataiku's Customer Success Manager provided Standard Chartered Digital COE with an AI strategy roadmap thinking, including approaches for scaling up our AI capabilities. This roadmap included a roadmap to climb up to the top of the AI maturity ladder, a list of resources needed, and a method for measuring success. They not only focused on the 'force' but also led deep-dive individual and group sessions with the data engineering team on 'the moment.' Even improving one individual's productivity by 30% within a few hours of coaching.

Second, Deloitte provided Standard Chartered Digital COE with comprehensive digital skills and delivery assessment. This assessment identified the skills and capabilities needed to implement the Data, Analytics, and AI strategy roadmap successfully. Deloitte also provided Standard Chartered Digital COE with expert Dataiku resources that could be used to fill any gaps in the team and augment our in-house capabilities.

Thirdly, Deloitte and SCB Digital CoE are pioneering new delivery assurance and governance approaches by adapting Dynamic System Delivery Methodology (DSDM) for data, analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Finally, Dataiku and Deloitte worked together to provide Standard Chartered Digital COE with a comprehensive digital scaling program. This program included regular platform/project health checks (quality assurance) and both online and in-person training sessions focused on the latest AI best practices (including building in-house LLM generative AI capability). This digital scaling program is helping Standard Chartered Digital COE to quickly and effectively build and scale capabilities to the next level. We have started to become a Digital Centre of Experts (global), not just a clever group of passionate engineers.

Day-to-day Change:

We are different now - well, starting to become different. The innovative and pioneering adaptation of the Dynamic System Delivery (DSD) methodology with Deloitte will change how we operate day-to-day and develop and deploy digital solutions on Dataiku. This methodology takes the best in principles of agile software development and continues to emphasize collaboration, flexibility, and rapid delivery - but now with a focus on quality, on-time delivery, and results-driven work management (not effort driven).

DSDM for Dataiku focuses on delivering high-quality solutions in a timely and cost-effective manner. User involvement is a critical component of the development process, emphasizes collaboration between the Dataiku engineering team and the customer, and total focus on delivering high-quality solutions rather than just quickly delivering working models and analytical applications.

The Deloitte team begins each new business idea by defining the project's scope and identifying the stakeholders. They then created a backlog of user stories and prioritized them based on the business needs. The team then divided the user stories into Dataiku projects (plus tasks defined within each project) and assigned them to the appropriate team members on the platform.

Finally, the team used tools tailored for AI and Dataiku to document the project and store this on the Wiki pages. This included creating user stories, Dataiku flow diagrams and recipe low-fidelity mock-ups, and technical documentation. This documentation ensured that all stakeholders understood the Dataiku project and that the code was easy to maintain.

This innovation brings together the best of SCB engineering innovative culture with Deloitte's deep understanding of Dataiku and how to bring business value change at scale. We are already on a day-to-day basis seeing changes in how we design, build and maintain Dataiku processes, models, and applications.

Business Area: Accounting/Finance

Use Case Stage: Built & Functional

Value Generated:

Dataiku and Deloitte have partnered to create a powerful combination of data science and analytics capabilities. Dataiku provides a comprehensive platform for data science and machine learning, while Deloitte brings its deep industry expertise and experience in data-driven transformation. Together, they are helping organizations unlock the value of their data and drive business outcomes.

Dataiku and Deloitte are helping Standard Chartered Digital CoE to:

Accelerate the development of data-driven solutions: Dataiku’s platform enables us to quickly develop and deploy data-driven solutions, while Deloitte’s expertise helps to ensure that the solutions are tailored to the specific needs of our team.
Leverage data to drive business outcomes: Dataiku and Deloitte are helping organizations to use data to identify opportunities, optimize processes, and make better decisions.
Create a culture of data-driven decision-making (operational within CoE and how solutions are delivered to the customer): Dataiku and Deloitte are helping us to create a culture of data-driven decision-making, where data is used to inform decisions and drive business outcomes.
Unlock the value of data: Dataiku and Deloitte are helping us to unlock the value of our data by leveraging data science and analytics capabilities. Their approach to monetizing and maximizing the immediate capabilities of our digital investments and assets enable us to focus on accelerating time to value whilst ensuring innovation remains a key difference.

Value Brought by Dataiku:

Dataiku's Customer Success Manager and the Enterprise AI platform provide a comprehensive suite of services and tools to help us in finance maximize the value of data - turning source information into consumer-ready data.

The platform helps the digital CoE team to quickly and easily access, analyze, and visualize financial and non-financial data, enabling our engineers to make better engineering decisions and drive better outcomes (quality, time to market, cost to maintain, and incremental insights from the data to the customer).

The Customer Success Manager knows us and provides personalized support and guidance to ensure we are getting the most out of the platform. They provide training, best practices, and advice to help our engineers understand how to leverage features to make better products (and more expert Dataiku engineers).

Additionally, the platform provides a range of features and tools to help us automate and streamline our financial performance data analysis and standard process controls.

Value Type: