About
Introducing Standard Chartered nexus – your bridge to banking innovation. We enable digital ecosystems to become their own ‘banks’ without needing to go through the heavy lifting of becoming one, by leveraging Standard Chartered’s banking licenses to integrate financial services into their offerings.
Innovation presentation
We are a white-label plug and play Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution powered by Standard Chartered with a vision to redefine the banking experience for customers globally by digitally marrying ecosystems to banks.
Already live in Indonesia with Bukalapak, and launching soon with Sociolla in 2023, we’re expanding to a second market with a third partner. Our track record speaks volumes – within just six months, our partnership with Bukalapak acquired over 230,000 customers, 98% of whom are new-to-bank. Standard Chartered nexus is the player to watch as the banking scene evolves.
What is the innovation:
Like a “bank-in-a-box”, our banking platform is seamlessly integrated within Standard Chartered’s core banking infrastructure. This positioning allows us to embed financial services directly into our partner platforms and serve their vast customer base without compromise.
Our uniform stack is both rapidly scalable and comprehensive. It is built on open source that achieves lower operating cost, simple operation and evolution.
• Scalability: Designed to support millions of customers, our platform adapts effortlessly to fluctuations in demand, creating an elastic system of engagement
• Comprehensiveness: Covering a wide spectrum of banking capabilities, our solution can be deployed swiftly within a container platform, effectively encapsulating the entire banking experience in a self-contained unit.
Why it’s innovative:
We built the platform with multi-tenancy and simple partner onboarding in mind. We deploy one instance per country and plug multiple partners into it. Partner integration is based on open standards (OpenID Connect, PSD2, FAPI): secure and easy to implement. Our platform adheres to all local security and compliance legislations through multiple assessments and approvals. Our technology solution adheres to the highest standards of security and regulatory requirements.
We are also a connectivity of ecosystems powered by mutual information and data sharing with partners – all to enhance user experience and create data products. We believe that we can serve customers better by understanding their behaviours and habits to provide a truly customised offering. To achieve this, we built a modern data lake for real-time and offline analytics.
Partners leveraging our solution stand to bolster their competitive offerings by having the ability to offer unique banking and financial products. Take our partnership with Bukalapak for example. We have launched BukaTabungan, a digital banking service that combines the reach of Bukalapak’s all-commerce platform and the technology of Standard Chartered’s Banking-as-a-Service solution to offer users greater convenience, security, and drive financial inclusion. Presently, BukaTabungan boasts a customer base exceeding 230,000 (as of 25 August 2023), with 98% of them new to Standard Chartered. Our current offerings span Current Account and Savings Account (CASA) services, debit cards, and lending capabilities (currently available to whitelisted users).
Our solution is transformational for Standard Chartered – for the first time in our 160-year legacy, Standard Chartered can target mass market segments and traditionally underserved users at scale. As one of the first traditional banks in Asia to offer this BaaS model, we wanted to build a scalable, on-cloud platform that could connect with multitudes of partners in different geographies seamlessly.
We enable Standard Chartered to develop new business models and build ecosystem partnerships to:
• Acquire mass market customers at scale
• Tap into partners’ ecosystems, leverage their competitive strengths and improve financial access to traditionally underbanked/unbanked populations in developing markets
Uniqueness of the project
Standard Chartered is one of the first few incumbent banks with 160 years of heritage to offer a BaaS proposition through partnerships with digital players within Southeast Asia.
Since we announced the launch of our solution, we’ve partnered with 2 leading e-commerce platforms in Indonesia – Bukalapak and Sociolla. The third partner in the second market is concurrently being deployed and a public announcement is expected sometime in H2 2023.
In September 2022, we officially launched BukaTabungan, a digital banking service that combines the reach of Bukalapak’s all-commerce platform and the technology of Standard Chartered’s Banking-as-a-Service solution to offer banking services that are inclusive, easy and secure to Bukalapak’s ecosystem of over 110 million users and 20 million business owners.
Debuting with its Current Account and Savings Account (CASA) services, BukaTabungan became one of the first digital banks to provide an end-to-end, fully digital Know Your Customer (KYC) / onboarding process that takes as fast as two minutes. Leveraging advanced automation and security technologies employing artificial intelligence, biometric facial recognition and E-KTP (Indonesia’s biometrics-enabled ID programme) validation, customers no longer have to visit a physical branch or speak to a banker to complete an application. In 2023, BukaTabungan expanded its offerings to include debit cards, as well as lending capabilities that are currently available to specific whitelisted users. As of 25 August 2023, BukaTabungan has onboarded over 230,000 customers, of which almost 100,000 of them own a debit card with us.
Through offering banking access, BukaTabungan also aims to support the business continuity and development of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) who make up 97% of Indonesia’s workforce, many of whom lack access to formal financing and are still recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. Bukalapak currently serves 6.8 million online merchants through its marketplace; 14.2 million businesses (including small family-owned kiosks known as ‘warungs’ and phone credit stores) through its online-to-offline platform, Mitra Bukalapak; and more than 110 million users throughout Indonesia, who mostly transact outside Tier-1 cities. With the launch of BukaTabungan, business owners and the general public will be able to enjoy the convenience of world-class banking services in the palm of their hands, anytime and anywhere.
Within 6 months of launch, BukaTabungan has achieved
• Fastest onboarding time of 2.09mins
• 98% of users are new to bank
• 85% application approval rate, of which 97% are opened straight in real time
• A mobile application rating of 4.36 on Google Play Store, which is highly well benchmarked against other financial services apps
The collaboration between Bukalapak and Standard Chartered is strengthened by the two organisations’ strong commitment to their shared vision of enhancing the digital customer experience, bridging the financial inclusion gap, and driving sustainable impact in emerging markets.
Additionally, our partnership with tech and beauty platform Sociolla will focus on empowering 30 million female millennials across Indonesia with financial literacy and improved financial access. The key metric for us to measure success is the scalability of our solution – both from a tech and financial inclusion perspective.
With our cloud-native solution, we are able to bring our solution to Standard Chartered’s 30+ global markets where we have a retail footprint and integrate with different ecosystems. By leveraging this global presence, we can achieve substantial shavings on customer acquisition cost. Acquiring customers at scale on our partners’ platforms could cost as little as €3, compared to €200 for traditional incumbents.
Press releases:
• We announced the launch of Standard Chartered’s BaaS solution (12 March 2020)
https://bit.ly/3Prsf7u
• Announced a joint partnership with Sociolla (1 October 2020)
https://bit.ly/3A9510t
• Announced a joint partnership with Bukalapak to improve financial inclusion (14 January 2021)
https://bit.ly/3AwzMxM
• Official announcement of BukaTabungan (5 September 2022)
https://scventures.io/bukalapak-and-standardchartered-launch-bukatabung…
