Synechron, Squirro and Standard Chartered Bank Win 2021 AI Awards

9, April 2021 - New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dubai, Pune, Singapore, Hong Kong

Synechron, Inc., in partnership with Squirro and Standard Chartered Bank, have been named winners in the 2021 BIG Innovation AI Excellence Awards in the “Natural Language Processing” category and for “Best Digital Collaboration Project” at The Asset Triple A Awards.

The future of financial services is no longer built solely on banks introducing new products and services, but by truly understanding the needs of marketplaces and clients and being open to collaborating with other ecosystem players to create new solutions and capabilities to anticipate and meet those needs. “Client Insights,” developed by combining the efforts of Synechron, Squirro, SC Ventures and the Digital Channel and Data Analytics (DCDA) function in Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking (CCIB) at Standard Chartered, is the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) that provides front-line sales with curated and actionable insights to unlock these new opportunities.

The teams first incubated this idea through SC Venture’s Intrapreneurship program. It was designed and built by leveraging Synechron’s experience in utilizing advanced analytics and NLP, Squirro’s entity resolution, contextual data mining and elastic search capabilities, Refinitiv’s rich research and market data sources, and the Bank’s Sales and Relationship Managers, the subject matter experts, who were most familiar with the challenges of uncovering relevant and actionable client intelligence from the barrage of information available within and outside the Bank. Through our combined work, “Client Insights” was able to bring some of the best industry practice, data sources and the latest in AI technology to create an industry-first, actionable client insights platform.

The solution is also the first Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking (CCIB) application to be deployed on AWS Cloud in Asia, a major milestone for Standard Chartered and our work together. In its pilot phase, this cross-functional platform has already helped nominated Relationship Managers (RMs) and client-facing staff across Singapore, UAE, UK and France generate many insights and triggers they needed to identify opportunities, add value to client conversations, and improve the way they work.

“We are delighted to have our Client Insights work recognized by these prestigious awarding bodies. To go from ideation to product build within six months, the project was no easy feat,” said Marc Westgate, Managing Consultant at Synechron. “It’s great to see the team’s hard work has been worthwhile and recognized by the industry.” Echoing his remarks, Synechron’s Head of EMEA and APAC at Synechron, Mihir Shah, said “This project has been pivotal in strengthening our relationship with Standard Chartered and our partnership with FinTechs in the wider ecosystem such as Squirro” he continued, “these awards are a testament to our growing capability in APAC and a sign of the exciting times ahead in this region.”

Bireshwar Dasgupta, Global Head, Data Solutions, DCDA at Standard Chartered Bank, believes the engagement is a great example of how technology can benefit the bank. “The Insights solution is a good example of how we are leveraging technology, and FinTech partnerships to co-create innovative analytics capabilities to enable our frontline teams to have better conversations,” he said. “We are pleased with this recognition of the initiative and hard work of our colleagues and partners.”

Moritz Müller, General Manager Asia & Head of Product at Squirro feels the work has been able to showcase the power AI has in achieving business goals. "We are incredibly proud of the innovative work resulting from the combined efforts of the Standard Chartered, Synechron, and Squirro teams,” he continued, "this award acknowledges the positive impact of our insights engine’s analytics and NLP capabilities, delivering actionable insights in the right context. It also drives us to keep striving for our vision, together with our clients and partners, to turn hard-to-use data into valuable assets with AI.”

The MVP is now being scaled to an enterprise-wide solution, which will help improve time-to-market, enhance client experience, and accelerate the front-line’s journey towards the new ways of working by embracing digital capabilities.

About Synechron

Synechron is a leading Digital Transformation Consulting firm for financial services, Accelerating Digital for financial institutions by providing innovative solutions to the financial services industry through three main business focus areas: Digital, Business Consulting, and Technology. Based in New York, our company has 22 offices around the globe, with over 10,000 employees producing over $650M+ in annual revenue. For more information on the company, please visit our LinkedIn community.

About Standard Chartered

Standard Chartered Bank is a leading international banking group, with a presence in 59 of the world’s most dynamic markets and serving clients in a further 85. Standard Chartered’s purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through their unique diversity, and their heritage and values are expressed in their brand promise, Here for good. Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges.

About Squirro

Businesses capitalize on new opportunities, improve client relations, and optimize decision-making capabilities using Squirro’s vertical-specific Augmented Intelligence solutions, which combine human intelligence with powerful AI. An Insights Engine at its core, Squirro delivers contextualized insights from your most relevant data sources and displays them directly, via workbench integrations, or through self-service applications.

Squirro works with global organizations, primarily in the Financial Services, Insurance, Telecommunications, and Manufacturing industries. Customers include Bank of England, Standard Chartered, ING, Brookson, Candriam, and Ninety-One. Founded in 2012, Squirro is currently present in Zürich, London, Munich, New York, and Singapore. Further information about AI-driven business insights can be found at https://squirro.com/

For more information, please contact our press teams:

Synechron Limited
Natalia Zurowski ACIM
Head of Marketing UK & APAC
Synechron, Inc.
APACMarketing@synechron.com

Standard Chartered
Kymberlie Andrew FRSA
Global Head of Digital Content & Communications CCIB – DCDA
Standard Chartered Bank
Kymberlie.Andrew@sc.com

Squirro
Gloria Fernandez
Marketing Team
Squirro Limited
gloria.fernandez@squirro.com