Standard Chartered Bank turns campaigns into personalized client experiences

The Business Issue

Banking is a relationship business. But at scale, it rarely feels like one. Standard Chartered is a global bank with a large presence in Asia and Africa, sitting in some of the fastest-growing markets in both continents. Its wealth and retail segment serves around 10 million clients, which includes affluent investors with sophisticated needs and cross-border customers who bank across multiple markets at once. That footprint is the bank’s advantage. Standard Chartered is known in the market as a super connector, linking people and opportunity across geographies.

Three years ago though, the bank’s client communication didn’t reflect that. Almost everything was campaign-led, powered by manual file uploads and batch data feeding a campaign calendar. Journeys were built around the next product to sell rather than the client living through them.

Campaigns are not the problem; they are essential to reach the customer. The problem is when it’s irrelevant for them. Outreach volume delivers engagement up to a point, then it subsides and click-through rates flatten no matter how many more messages go out. Historical, batch-only data couldn’t tell the bank what a client needed in the moment. And speed to market was a further drag, with heavy manual effort behind every campaign. Standard Chartered Bank understood the importance of personalizing client experiences to drive engagement rather than sending outbound communications that feels like another campaign lacking relevance.

The Solution

Standard Chartered set out to move from campaigns to experiences and concluded that the answer was as much organizational as it was technical. The bank fused business, technology, marketing, and data into a single unit of 400–500 people called “One Delivery,” organized not by product but by journey. Fusing around 30 squads, each paired a product owner with designers, front- and back-end developers, and Pega Customer Decision Hub™ experts own the micro journeys a client actually experiences, such as digital acquisition of customer, early engagement activation, fund-in, and upgrades. They understood where the customers are in the lifecycle, used real-time data, and collected data on what content they are interested in for campaigns to be effective. Campaigns turned into a personalized experience that sustained growth.

Underneath sits a three-layer architecture. The most important, at the base, is the data that links to the microjourneys customers are plotted in to build relevant experiences. What began as manual file uploads is now a repository of roughly 1,200 to 1,300 attributes, (35% real time, 65% batch data) fed by a mix of data emission from core systems, process APIs that pull on demand, and stored batch data jobs for deep analytics. Standard Chartered is deliberate that not everything needs to be real time. Analytical history and live signals are integrated together to create relevance for the intelligence layer.

The intelligence layer is Pega Customer Decision Hub™. It consumes those signals, decides the next best action, and pushes it into an experience layer of eight connected channels, with results feeding continuously back into adaptive models. Around 600 use cases now run across the client lifecycle, replicated to different markets rather than rebuilt each time. It is live in Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Malaysia, and the UAE; with China, Taiwan, and Korea planned.

Crucially, this is a hybrid model, not digital only. In an affluent wealth bank, trust and relationship managers matter and they work from the same intelligence. Pega Customer Decision Hub™ is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to deliver prioritized client insights to relationship managers. Client interaction outcomes are fed back by relationship managers into adaptive models, creating a continuous learning cycle.

The Results

The shift from outreach to relevance has changed both the bank’s ecosystem and its clients’ experience. Income driven through the engagement engine has grown 2.7X since 2023, and impressions delivered to clients have scaled into billions between 2024 and 2026. Speed to market has almost tripled, with about 70% of go-to-market time removed because of co-located, multifunctional squads and automation.

The engine also learns. About 40% of what the squads build each sprint is an enhancement to something that already exists, guided by data on what is working and what should be retired. For instance, any banner or content left beyond 90 days sees click-through rates fall by 40% to 45% so it’s a constant discipline to curate content and experience.

Clients feel the difference. In Singapore alone, around 100,000 clients open the app each day, and roughly a quarter of them read the wealth content feed, leaving signals the bank uses to serve them better and to give relationship managers a view on what matters to their customers before a conversation even starts.

Looking ahead, Standard Chartered is extending the model from two markets to nine or ten, building Standard Chartered AI with Pega Customer Decision Hub™, a conversational AI interface that’s currently in beta. The bank also wants to use Pega Customer Decision Hub™ as more than an arbitration engine, extending it into eligibility, fulfillment, and pricing across its wealth, lending, and deposit systems so personalization reaches the whole experience itself, not just the message around it.

Want to dive deeper into Standard Chartered’s journey? Watch their PegaWorld session here.