A three-year partnership will see the acceleration of Standard Chartered Bank’s digital acceleration by adopting a cloud-first strategy. To achieve being a “cloud-first bank,” the financial institution will be leveraging Microsoft Azure in co-innovating open banking and real-time payments.

As part of its digital transformation, Standard Chartered will adopt a multi-cloud approach, where significant applications, including its core banking and trading systems and new digital ventures such as virtual banking and banking as-a-service, will be cloud-based by 2025. The bank will also adopt a cloud-first principle for all new software developments and major enhancements.

The first set of capabilities to move to Microsoft Azure will be Standard Chartered’s trade finance systems, which will open up seamless cross-border trade for the bank’s corporate and institutional clients.

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“Using cloud services improves our ability to be agile and innovative while increasing our operational efficiency and resilience,” said Michael Gorriz, group chief information officer of Standard Chartered. “As the disruption in the financial industry continues, we can focus on client benefits by deploying our solutions quicker and allowing for faster integration of new business models and partners.”

The partnership will also advance the bank’s digital workplace transformation with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams providing modern productivity and collaboration tools to Standard Chartered’s 84,000 employees across its 60 markets.

“With the increasing trend of an always-on digital economy, commercial and consumer clients are looking for applications and services that empower them to do online banking from anywhere, flexibly and efficiently,” said Bhupendra Warathe, CTO, Cloud Transformation at Standard Chartered.

Standard Chartered will also use Microsoft Azure artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics capabilities to enhance and automate banking processes as well as deliver hyper-personalization of its client products and experiences. Co-innovation in open banking application programming interface (API) and Internet-of-Things-based, real-time payments will also help the bank unlock new banking experiences for clients.