Awards for Excellence 2020
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It’s hard to find a more comprehensive and cutting-edge offering in wealth management across Africa than that of Standard Bank, which is why the bank wins the award for best bank for wealth management in Africa once again.
One of its mottos is ‘banking on your terms’, which means giving clients a range of options in how they bank and transact. The latest option is a multi-currency digital wallet, Shyft. Each wallet contains up to five currencies and can be linked to a physical card.
“For clients who may have children studying abroad, for example, this means rather than sending money via Swift etc, parents can simply load the wallet with the relevant currency for their child’s residency, and those children can use the funds at point-of-sale terminals or draw the money they need from an ATM,” says Shaun Kotwal, head of Standard Bank wealth and investment South Africa.
It is one of many innovative tools for the bank’s high net-worth clients. Others include the My360 wealth management app, which provides an aggregated look at assets and liabilities, held locally and internationally, across 20,000 institutions.
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Shaun Kotwal |
The bank’s commitment to technology is also shown in the tools available to its wealth advisers. The key one is PowerBI, which analyses client data, including spending, to build a better picture of lifestyle and wealth needs.
Indeed, there is a strong commitment to serving relationship managers and ensuring they are trained to be “future ready”, says Kotwal. The bank’s Challenger Portal provides a platform for peer-to-peer learning and clear direction on how to be a top-tier adviser.
On topics from legacy planning and estate structuring through to corporate deals for large business-owning clients, the benefits of being a universal bank with a strong investment banking business are clear. In 2019, headline earnings for the wealth and investment business increased 37% year on year.
Finally, in South Africa, the bank has become a leader for family offices, providing not just administrative services and finance but also thought leadership around how to build an office or how to divest or set up a holding structure. That advice has been leveraged to apply to any complex client and not just a family office, Kotwal says.
