Standard Bank is once again a worthy winner of the award for Africa’s best bank for wealth management. It offers wealth management services in southern, eastern and parts of western Africa – 15 countries in all, including South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
Technology and people are at the heart of its offering. Its Challenger portal, a platform for peer-to-peer learning, was a major asset in 2020, as the bank helped high net-worth clients to navigate Covid-related turbulence.
A tie-up with Salesforce, announced last year by group chief executive Sim Tshabalala, and PowerBI, an internal reporting tool, helped Standard Bank to deliver clear portfolio insights to its relationship managers. Its Elite Wealth system gives clients a holistic view of their entire portfolio, encompassing investment performance and fees.
A three-tier system allows clients to choose from one of three risk profiles and its offering is enhanced by a planning tool called My360 that gives customers greater control over their private wealth journey. The bank reckons the number of My360 customers rose by 38,000 in 2020, adding R45 billion of linked managed assets to its balance sheet. Last year also saw Standard Bank roll out the service in Ghana.
It also upgraded its foreign exchange application, Shyft, to let customers carry out cost-free peer-to-peer rand-denominated payments, increasing its customer base by 30% over the previous year. Assets under management rose 4% year on year in 2020 to R107.8 billion, with the number of new clients up by 114% in South Africa and 72% in Ghana.
