COVER STORY
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n Standard Chartered Bank the CIO role looks at both technology and back office operations, and I am responsible for that for the three countries in East Africa; Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania,” says Mr. Gitau.
Leveraging technology to Improve User Experience According to Mr. Gitau the bank’s current focus on technology is, leveraging on it to improve its customers’ user experience. Giving a good example of this he said that this year the bank rolled out a Mobile App on both the IoS and Android stores for its personal and priority customers, which is an improvement on its previous offering which was being done on a USSD menu. “The key thing was to give our customers a more user friendly, a more intuitive way of interacting with the bank,” he continued. With the App, the bank improved the experience of individual customers, but a bank the size of Standard Chartered also caters to companies and thus on the corporate and commercial side of the business and institutional banking, the bank has been working tirelessly to enhance its straight to bank platform, which companies can use for online payments and online collections. “So one of the key things we have worked on this year is the tax payment modules, with that we have given our customers the ability to pay taxes, whether it is; income taxes, custom du-
ties, excise duties, etcetera, through online straight to bank twenty four-seven (always on),” he said. “So the system allows you to do that anywhere you are, and allows you to get confirmation receipts twenty four-seven (always on),” he continued. With its straight to bank platform the bank has also been able to integrate existing infrastructure in the form of mobile money wallets such as; M-pesa and Airtel Money, to create convenience for its customers. “Also for a better client interaction experience, we have also launched Retail Workbench. This gives us the capability to interact with our clients, open bank accounts and receive loan applications digitally using secure tablets without paper filling,” added Gitau. The bank, according to Mr. Gitau, has also done some core IT investments this year with the aim of creating further resilience within its platform, as far as hardware capabilities are concerned, in its quest for resilience the company revamped its entire hardware storage facility. “On the IT side; whether it’s our network capability, whether it’s our storage capability; we have been working to deal with duplication, by virtualizing some of our servers,” Gitau adds.
What’s UP with Cloud? “Cloud in the financial services sector has been a bit of a slow starter, as far as
WHO IS MR. GITAU? I’ve worked for Standard Chartered for just about 14 years now, in various roles and functions, I have an accounting background; accounting, audit and risk management is my training. As part of those 14 years almost half of it has been spent in Singapore, I worked in Standard Chartered Singapore for a period of time. My experience is varied, I’ve done; audit, operational risk, mergers/acquisitions, I’ve run a group control function (on the risk side) but for me the part of IT came when I was running integrations for the bank, I was responsible for the corporate side of the bank on the integration of the operations, and that is how I came to know and understand the bank’s IT environments and the bank’s IT requirements, and that attracted me towards the IT side. I started my role about three years ago at Standard Chartered, East Africa; in it I’m responsible for a team of about 700 across East Africa. customer services are concerned, and a lot of that is because of Data Privacy laws,” says Gitau. The good news, according to Gitau, is that things are becoming simpler in terms of where you can store client data, how you can store it and who has the ability to store it for you with proper Data Privacy. But that hasn’t stopped the bank from going cloud, at least for its internal functions. “We have an e-learning platform where we are using the cloud internally to provide a standard, very intuitive learning and knowledge platform to our staff, so all the 85,000 staff have access to the same training materials and e-learning material on the cloud,” asserts Gitau, as he goes on to add that as Data Privacy laws get resolved the bank will be looking at having an external cloud because, from an IT efficiency perspective cloud help a lot.
IT team duties Mr. Gitau pointed out that in Kenya, Standard Chartered Bank has an IT team of about 50 people, who do a number of things in IT, including: www.cio.co.ke | OCTOBER 2016 | CIO EAST AFRICA
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