[Music] [Nauman Bashir] How many of you believe in the power of AI and do you think it can really transform the businesses we are in? Please raise your hands.
We have a lot in common.
Fantastic. Okay, before I start talking about the thing, I'll just introduce myself. My name is Nauman Bashir. I am Head of Digital Sales Globally. I have some responsibilities additionally in the Standard Chartered Bank for the local franchise in Singapore, an engineer by education.
I started my career as a technologist...
In formerly ExxonMobil. I wrote many programs which didn't work. So then I decided to join a bank. With a bank for over 17 years now, long journey. I've been part of technology in the bank. I've ran back office operations in some of our franchises. I've been part of investment committees. I am currently responsible for digital business.
Tennis has been a passion. Actually, it was last December I went back to my hometown. I'm from Pakistan and my small hometown, and I have a nice green strip over there that I used to play tennis when I was a kid. And I met the grandson of my coach...
And I had a good one hour session with him. And that was so nice to call some of those memories back and then talk about what we used to do years ago. Last but not the least, my family, I think that keeps most of us driving and most of us happy and excited. And they tell me...
When AI would not work, their hug will still be helpful and make me excited and energetic. I hope that's the same for you as well. My parents, they're no more in this world. They passed away a few years back. But I think whatever I am or I will be...
I've learned all from them...
And I remember them every day, and they're a source of information from me for every moment.
On the extreme right is my brother.
No matter what I know, he tells me I know little about things. And he believes that he's there to remind me as often as we talk. He has been my mentor.
We talk a lot about, whether it's Rumi, prophet of love or it's about human being augmented with AI kits. Okay, that's all about me. Now let's talk about Standard Chartered Bank. I'll give you a little intro.
Anyone who hasn't heard about Standard Chartered Bank in this room? Okay, I'm impressed. Thank you.
It's a leading bank, not as much in North America or in Europe, but primarily we are proud to offer our customers a network of over 60 markets for corporate business, as well as for retail business. We are providing them all the opportunities on those emerging markets across Asia, Middle East, and Africa, and giving them that network, which can give them sustainable growth.
Our focus is on cross border as a network bank and on the consumer side on wealth and an affluent business and we are proud to share that we are leader in the markets we operate.
Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity and our brand promises here for good.
Let's talk about culture a bit as well.
We are 170 years old bank. We are here for good as our promise. And as part of the culture, we develop valued behaviors. We try to inculcate that in our entire workforce, 90,000 people, never settle. We try to push boundaries, go as far as we can to help our customers.
Better together, we are here for long-term relationships.
We are in the business of prosperity and we want to make sure our customers grow with us.
That's so important. And do the right things.
Making sure that client is first, whatever we do.
Okay, now I'm going to talk about the topic we are here for, which is digital and how AI will help and influence that.
Our digital strategy, we put that a few years ago, quickly we'll take you through that. Content and personalization is key, to make sure that we have tailored content, we provide really personal experiences to engage our customers and drive loyalty with them. Very important pillar for that.
Most of the conversation we had today, everyone spoke about that let's not do things which we can't measure. So the second pillar is so important that you need to have analytics, you need to have deep understanding of what your customers are doing, what they're able to do, what they're not able to do and then that helps us learn.
No matter how good the content is, no matter how deeply you understand, if your sales journeys are not really optimized...
It's a bit of problem and you'll see huge friction despite the traffic coming in. So that remains a priority for us.
So proud to share that in our markets, we were the first one to create a customer community. We have 10,000 strong customer, we call it Inner circle.
We work with that, those customers, to really from creating concepts of new product to new experiences and new offerings. So we closely work with them. And we have another arm of the same community, which is our own staff, we call it Staff Connect as well. So we work very closely with them to define and refine our experiences.
Mobile experiences are important, and...
Mobile-first has been our strategy. But also just want to share that when we created marketplaces in our mobile apps, across the markets we saw huge lift in our sales and conversions. So we work closely with Pega as well as with Adobe to personalize the marketplace and find next best action for our customer, whether it's a product or it's a next action they can take, for example, to activate a card or deepen a relationship or do a transaction on an investment side.
Effective digital marketing and engagement is key. And close partner of Adobe in driving that. All of that is underpinned by MarTech ecosystem, which we work external, internal partners. I see a few colleagues from here, from Accenture. They work with us and they really augment our skill and capability and our reach to drive better conversion with our customers.
At the end of the day, if I walk in any financial district, in any of our key markets and walk into any of our competitors, probably they'll have the same kit, they'll have same tools. The only difference what's going to make is either people in this room or your teams back home or wherever your organizations are. So that is extremely important part that how do you really scale up your teams and scale them up to do the right thing.
So I'll talk more about content and personalization because I think the key work we have done on the AI is from that area in particular.
These strategies are good and it's important to have them, but the moment you start executing, you realize that there are quite a few problems. And let's talk about some of those problems now...
Slow campaign velocity, creative asset creation, inefficient operations.
Do you think it's relevant to you people in this room? Do you have the same problem? Exactly.
What it means in practical terms is that, our speed to market is not really there. That affects our ROI.
If you really want to personalize that scale, the speed of content creation, creative asset creation needs to be really fast and that was a problem for us. We ended up creating very generic images or creators for our customer, and we didn't have time and resource to do that.
All of that inefficient processes, too much of back and forth, over emails, Excel files, PowerPoints, all these things were problem. But as someone said that these problems are not really stop signs, they're just guidelines. You need to make sure that you understand them and then you find ways how to deal with that. And that is I think we are going to talk about it now.
I'll take you through, go a little deeper in our operating model...
Which is around-- First part is on the creative briefing and the workflow management, where you come up with the campaign theme, your overall objective.
And then concept development. You come up with a first set of briefs, first set of creatives and followed by the design, execution, and permutations.
All of that needs to be adopted based on various channels we deal with, whether it's a mobile or it's a web or any of our digital properties or even including sometime offline properties as well. So that was normally how these four areas were, all of them come together and create a campaign from concept to really taking it to the customer. And all of them have their own challenges. They were slow, the processes were manual.
As I mentioned, creative development was slow, high number of back and forth, and limited capacity for creative adoption. So next thing is that how we dealt with it and what we did-- Okay, before that, let me share some stats with you. So in 2023, 2 years ago when we started this AI journey, we used to do around 20 campaigns per month, maybe around 240 plus minus over a year. Assets were 3,600 in a year. And operations run 1 campaign, medium sized campaign was like 21 days...
Which is a pretty long time.
And on an average, every campaign would go through five to six attritions back and forth with various teams. Not a great position to be in when you are competing with other players...
What we realize were doing much better than us. That is where we changed our operating model. And the key change we made was to bring in AI.
I call it operating model 2.0. In three pillars of the model, which is the concept development. First one, we introduced ChatGPT. I will show you one example how it really helped us.
On the design execution side, we brought in Adobe Firefly. We heard a lot about it today morning, during the Keynotes and various conversations. So happy to share that we are the early adopters of it, and we started working on it in 2023. And I think we have-- We went full scale last year together with our partners and that has really helped. And we'll talk a little more about it in a while. And then adaptation of all the creatives, both with the Adobe Firefly as well as with Figma.
I want to call out that by no means we...
Have completed that journey, we are still on that.
This Adobe Workfront is work in progress. We are implementing that and hopefully during course of this year, we'll complete that. But on the-- I think our conversation is more on the ChatGPT and AI, which we have done and we'll talk about some of the results over here as well.
Okay. I'll show you one example. I don't know if you can read it from there. So this part, the concept development, what we wanted was to reach out to our customer...
To drive a wealth proposition. Please don't keep cash, please invest. And the brief was given to ChatGPT. Can you help me create a brief with drives, a change from taking customers away from cash and moving them towards investments? Can you read it? Okay. So headline came up as "Cash is no more the king." And ChatGPTs ideas were...
Create an image which showing stock market like arrow going downwards and...
A crown with currency notes on that.
When that was fed into...
Firefly...
These two options were created. So the way Firefly works is it gives you four options and you can pick up the one which you really find most useful in your situation. So the brief suggested two areas, two components of the image. One was the arrow and other is a crown.
Further work on that...
And I'll show you a little video.
The prompt was improved. Instructions were given and the concept was refined and the creative was improved.
So one side is the stock market arrow going down and the crown with currency notes around it...
That two separate images were combined.
And after that, the last stage is the adaptation where all these images were adopted for various channels, for mobile, for web, different screen size of mobile...
The mobile web view, all that was done together with Firefly and Figma.
And that is what we got in the end.
Cash is no longer the king, and since we are in multiple markets, so you could see that we have a multi-language creative coming out of it.
So pretty crisp image, very sharp with human interaction, but limited human interaction. Starting the brief from ChatGPT, refining it, coming up with options, feeding that into Firefly, working on it, combining images and creating a story which we thought is compelling.
And just to share with you...
As I mentioned earlier, we are pivoting towards wealth.
And the lot of work we are doing is towards on the investment side.
Okay. Let's talk about the results.
Operating Model 2.0. How different that is from 1.0? Our campaign velocity has gone up significantly 1.5x, but we used to do 240, is now 600, assets is 1.3x. We do over 8,400. Operation part, 21 days have become 16. Is it great? Are we happy and satisfied? Absolutely not. But, yeah, that is where we are. And that's what I mentioned that the Workfront is still in progress and hopefully end of the year will improve that. Our target is to 10 and then eventually to 5. But you see that, this is the improvement we have made over the last few months or a year plus minus and we're working together with our partners and our teams are learning how to really adopt this new technology. Okay. And I think next slide is just to share a few images created by Firefly...
For multiple markets, multiple languages, different product lines.
Yep. What's next? As exciting our journey has been what we have achieved so far, I think what is even more exciting is what is yet to come.
So our focus will remain on productivity, scalability, velocity, and reusability. This year what we are going to do is to extend our MarTech state.
At the bottom you could see Adobe Workfront, something which is work in progress. And we are also adding...
Adobe AEM and CDP, that would really boost our MarTech capabilities, both for DIY journeys, which means do it yourself or self-assisted journeys, as well as we are working closely with our relationship teams and we are creating those solutions for them, that this whole MarTech solution will support them, our relationship managers as well for wealth and investments and all that. So, yep...
Our vision for future is powered by GenAI, driven of course with innovation, with a lot of passion...
And working with the partners to make sure that we create the most value out of it.
I think I'll end my conversation with this. One of my favorite quotes, I have quite a few, so this is just one of them.
So we are just talking about the incredible capabilities of AI and how it is transforming our customer engagement.
And we should also think that what is driving it. And we saw how data is helping us. We saw how AI, that those tools are helping us. Just reflect on what Einstein's had here. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." It's all about working towards that unknown.
I think AI is a great path to it, a great companion for that. It really augments our ability, our capabilities to find out what we don't know.
So the most important message which we discuss and we brainstorm and we believe it in our conversation is that let's continue this journey, let's keep working towards that unknown and use these new technologies to find that path. And wherever we can, be the trailblazer to create something new, which wasn't really done before that.
And that's my request to you as well.
As a community of AI enthusiasts or the people who believe, as all of you said that you are, let's continue to work together. By no means I'm trying to share that we have mastered that. Yeah, we have started that. I was talking to one of the colleagues over here, the results are encouraging, they're rewarding and exciting. But we need to work, we need to work together as an industry and share and have those learnings and partner with each other and really create huge value for our customers using these tools.
That's all I have. Happy to take any questions.
[Music]
