The Standard Chartered Bank has announced today its partnership with Microsoft in a push to make the banking platform cloud-first, thus, promoting services like “virtual banking, next-generation payments, open banking and banking-as-a-service.”

The London-headquartered bank will leverage Microsoft’s Azure and is aiming to migrate its core services on the cloud by 2025. However, the timeline depends on regulatory approvals.

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“Cloud is a cornerstone of Standard Chartered’s strategy to meet the present and future banking needs of our clients.[…]Using cloud services improves our ability to be agile and innovative, while increasing our operational efficiency and resilience,” Michael Gorriz, group chief information officer, said in a statement.

“As disruption in the financial industry continues, we can focus on client benefits by deploying our solutions quicker and allowing for faster integration of new business models and partners.”

The Transformation Plan Is Already in Place

The press release detailed that the bank will move its trade finance systems to Microsoft Azur that will benefit in cross-border trade for the bank’s corporate and institutional clients.

Furthermore, the bank will also use Microsoft Azure artificial intelligence and data analytics capabilities, thus, enhancing and automating the banking processes. This, according to the bank, will add to “hyper personalization of its client products and experiences.”

Standard Chartered is also expecting to unlock new banking services based on its open banking application programming interface (API) and internet-of-things based on real-time payments.

“Cloud computing is an enabler for financial institutions to modernize their infrastructure and systems, to gain the agility they need to respond to competitive pressures, regulatory environments and customer demand,” Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, added.

“The speed and scale of continuous innovation offered by Azure allows us to innovate with the latest AI services to meet evolving client needs,” Bhupendra Warathe, Standard Chartered CTO of cloud transformation, said. “We can pilot new apps in one market and scale them rapidly across others. This is especially important for a bank with a footprint as broad and diverse as ours.”