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Bloomberg
In the Ivory Coast, Standard Chartered Plc may have found its template for the future of banking.
Didier Drogba, the retired Ivorian soccer star, was drafted as a “digital bank ambassador†on social media. Fifteen months later, more than 18,000 of his compatriots have signed up for digital-only accounts, outstripping the London-based lender’s early targets.
Ivory Coast is just one of 60 countries where StanChart operates. What might please StanChart boss Bill Winters even more than new customers — in a market where it had minimal presence — is how little it cost to get them in a time of soaring IT costs for banks. The project was completed in nine months, using in-house technology, working off an existing banking license.
“Forever and a day, it’s been one of the biggest problems of the bank — it’s in too many countries without a lower-cost way to market,†said Ian Gordon, who heads bank research at Investec Bank Plc. Digital-only banking addresses that structural challenge, he said.
The larger question: whether this strategy will work in StanChart’s biggest markets, which are further along the development curve than sub-Saharan Africa — and too massive to penetrate with a build-out of traditional branches.
In the big Asian countries, 166-year-old StanChart boo-med and busted lending mo-ney to local corporates and wealthy families, with retail branch networks in those nations often an afterthought. Digitisation is a way to change that — and stay ahead of big tech companies before they push into finance.
“You can’t walk away from an India, China or Indonesia, and say ‘look — we are so sub-optimal there is no way we are going to win,’†Aalishaan Zaidi, StanChart’s head of digital banking, said in an interview.
The Ivorian template was followed in Uganda, where the digital bank led to an eight-fold increase in new account openings, and in Tanzania, where more new customers have sig-ned up so far this year than in the whole of 2018. Up next: Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy.