Satya Ganesh of Standard Chartered clinches Executive of the Year award for Banking at Malaysia Management Excellence Awards 2021

The Bank changes how financial institutions leverage innovative technological solutions, automation, and digitisation to develop future proof solutions for their processes

Satya joined Standard Chartered in late 2016 as Head of Operational Excellence to lead the Lean Digital and Robotics teams and drive process improvements and automations. In under five years, Satya has transformed his team to SCNXT, an innovation centre of excellence which partners with stakeholders across Group Operations, Technology, Risk and Finance functions to provide cutting edge solutions. As of now, SCNXT is almost 500 members strong across Malaysia, India, China, Poland and Singapore with four pillars which work in an integrated way to identify improvement opportunities and deliver large scale transformation programmes as well as bespoke intelligent automation use cases.

Satya was the architect of a framework for ‘Performance 20’ programme which kicked off in October 2017 under the strong sponsorship of the CEO which went on to deliver more than the target of US$150 million when the programme concluded in 2020.

Adapting rapidly to a world of intelligent automation and data science, Satya and his team have introduced the use of innovative products. One such product is SWOOSH, the Bank’s first inhouse AI platform built completely ground up to solve image based and unstructured data based problems through its computer vision and natural language processing engines. SWOOSH also won the Artificial Intelligence in Banking at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2021 and the SBR Technology Excellence Awards 2021. SCypher is another innovative offering which enables knowledge powered graph insights and was awarded the ‘Best Cybersecurity Project’ in the regional space at The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2021.

With unrelenting focus on continuous improvement and experimentation to support the Bank’s productivity and growth, SCNXT has been able to drive capacity creation for its stakeholders upward of 900,000 productive hours on an annualised basis since its inception through lean digital, robotics, machine learning and data analytics. Moreover, over last year and this, the multiple initiatives designed and deployed by SCNXT across various business functions and Standard Chartered entities have contributed US$30 million+ in financial benefits