Standard Bank Embraces AI to Revolutionize Customer Experience

Standard Bank has set an ambitious course to deepen its integration of artificial intelligence (AI) within its operations. While the bank is not attempting to break new ground as an early adopter, it instead strategically positions itself as a "fast follower," ready to make significant strides once the technology has been proven effective.

The drive for AI incorporation comes at a time when Standard Bank, Africa's largest lender by assets, continues to expand its footprint, serving customers across more than 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In its aim to better meet the complex needs of its clientele, the bank has turned to Microsoft’s Power BI platform for advanced data insights and analytics.

The transition to a self-service BI model in 2017 marked the beginning of a transformation in how the bank uses data to understand and service customer needs more accurately. Power BI, according to Ziyaad Valli, Lead Analytics Engineer, has democratized data science across the institution, fostering an environment of insight-driven decision making.

Strong adoption of Power BI was evident by 2020, with over 3,000 members in Standard Bank’s related Microsoft Teams channel. The intention was not just to address past business performance but also to predict future trends and customer behavior.

The bank's Insurance Business group embraced the opportunity, using Power BI’s AI and machine learning capabilities to refine how they target policyholders. One such successful application was in the prediction of funeral cover product sales trends, uncovering unexpected insights into customer demographics and purchasing behavior which defied conventional marketing wisdom.

Mohammed Tootla, Manager of Data Visualization for the Insurance Business group, emphasized the transformative power of AI analytics within Power BI to deliver rapid and insightful analysis, far beyond what was previously possible.

Results were compelling. By employing a binary classification model via Power BI’s AutoML feature, the team was able to predict customer churn, evaluating and segmenting 88,000 customers to inform and improve retention campaigns. The speed and efficacy with which these insights were generated stood in stark contrast to traditional data science methods.

The collaboration between Valli and Tootla has more ambitious goals on the horizon, including expansion of their predictive models across Standard Bank's full spectrum of insurance products and the creation of comprehensive datasets to inform customer lifetime value models. The use of AI and analytics is reshaping the bank’s approach to its services, embedding efficiency and proactive strategy at the heart of its operations.

Power BI and, more broadly, the AI capacities it enables, are setting the stage for a future where Standard Bank can deliver highly personalized and efficient services to its customers, marking an exciting chapter in its technological evolution.