Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan Ltd (渣打台灣銀行) yesterday said it took home the International Retail Bank of the Year — Taiwan and the Digital Banking Initiative of the Year — Taiwan from this year’s Retail Banking Awards presented by Asian Banking and Finance magazine.
The event honors the most outstanding banks and financial institutions that have introduced groundbreaking products and services to empower them to adapt to a rapidly evolving tech landscape.
Standard Chartered Taiwan’s retail banking shows that it deserves its spot as one of the top retail businesses among the international banks in Taiwan. With its attractive returns, it continues to grow its franchise in a profitable and cost-effective way, while successfully navigating headwinds due to the COVID-19 pandemic and volatile global market conditions.
Photo courtesy of Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan Ltd
“We are delighted to receive this commendation from Asian Banking and Finance,” Standard Chartered Taiwan retail banking head Kate Lin (林素真) said. “This is the testimony to the efforts to reinvent and digitize the business model with a human touch. It also demonstrated the right strategy of focusing on clients, which inspired the team to continue to provide the best services to our clients and to further discover their unmet needs.”
Last year, Standard Chartered Taiwan delivered significant growth in income and operating profit. With the bank’s strategic focus on high-net-wealth and affluent segments, top-line growth was mainly driven by underlying wealth management growth, coupled with double-digit growth in core lending products.
Moreover, to capture the swift changes in client behavior and the evolution of financial services, Standard Chartered Taiwan has reinvented its business model along with innovative digital initiatives with its launch of SC Taiwan Line official accounts and SC Keyboard Banking last year.
The Line accounts aim to extend banking services from clients’ fingertips to their social activities.
Embedded in SC Line official accounts, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot named Stacy provides instant, round-the-clock interactive support with the know-how to fulfill requests and solve problems, ranging from the latest product offerings to credit card payments and reward point inquiries.
SC Keyboard Banking is the first-ever keyboard-based social media payment capability in Taiwan, which allows people to send money and view account balances without interrupting their social moments on messaging apps. The application boasts three key features of this cutting-edge service: seamless client journey, gamification and community, as well as single tap to banking services.
SC Keyboard Banking empowers clients’ digital capability in an easy and seamless way, and has received broad and positive feedback.
This year, Standard Chartered Taiwan said it aims to continue to expand partnerships with fintech, tech and e-commerce companies to build an ecosystem and originate the younger digital adopter segment.
The bank also aims to leverage COVID-19 prevention experiences, continue to build a future-proof organization by cultivating agile ways of working and building an active-learning culture to equip its entire workforce with future skills, it said.
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