Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) was Highly Commended (HC) in the Outstanding Private Bank: Southeast Asia category at the 32nd Private Banker International (PBI) Global Wealth Awards 2022, held on 6 October, for its new digital platform and future plans.
SCB’s vision is to become a major digital platform service provider in Thailand under its planned new parent, SCB X, as well as a Southeast Asian and wider regional financial tech conglomerate by 2025, offering its processing power to others and services via a wide variety of partners. This is in-line with the financial services (FS) trend towards the usage of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that make data exchange and multiple service provision much easier.
Making the private banker’s life easier by giving them greater access to fast, diverse information is a key requirement too, as part of SCB’s technological and organisational overhaul, which has three key over-arching strategic pillars. Any changes or IT updates must deliver:
Personalisation: must be front and centre for all things whether it is data, automated advisory insights, log-on, face-to-face, or particular services, such as asset allocations that use in-house experts for discretionary portfolio management (DPM) on behalf of clients in-line with their pre-stated risk appetite and goals. Whatever SCB delivers must be personalised. That requires integration and alignment of IT systems, flexible core infrastructures, training for the staff and so on.
Extensive solutions with a value-adding advisory platform: A full suite of digital tools and data that can flow across the organisation, and to external partners in a secure way, for staff and clients is essential to be able to offer the wealth creation and growth options SCB wants to. For example, SCB’s open IT architecture that can handle open API-enabled calls for data enables 21 local asset management companies, including SCB Asset Management, to offer a wide variety of offshore mutual funds, both in equity and fixed income. Structured and other non-traditional products can also now be more easily added to its technology stack as well.
Seamless journey with full access to group wide services: this delivers the enhanced customer experience (CX) that SCB deems as essential for its ultra and high net worth (U/HNW) clients in Thailand and elsewhere, who are often time poor so need fast, easy, and connected services from on-boarding to advice, investment, and other actions.
Having an open IT architecture helps provide a seamless good CX. Staff empowerment is vital too. SCB’s has provided training for Private Bankers that use the new in-house wPlan platform capabilities in order to deliver personalised insights, products, and services. Apart from that, variety of in-house training courses are exclusively developed for staffs. The bank has also invested in other new digital service and data platforms, such as its Easy Invest solution, and continues to do so in pursuit of its vision for the future.