StanChart selects Akamai to upgrade its online banking

Akamai to improve speed of Web delivery, security of Internet banking by streamlining lender's IT infrastructure.

Akamai Technologies, Singapore, announced on Tuesday that it is helping Standard Chartered Bank deliver faster and more secure Internet banking applications worldwide.

Akamai is enabling the global bank to centralise its IT infrastructure to drive economies of scale, while ensuring that the streamlined model can deliver new online banking services to customers and generate growth opportunities in new markets, according to an Akamai release in PRNewswire.

As a global bank, Standard Chartered aims to be the leader in each of the markets in which it operates by providing quick, efficient and secure online services to customers. This model requires data centres in each geography, which is costly and complex to manage. Akamai Technologies enables Standard Chartered to adopt a model of centralised Web hosting supported by Akamai's globally distributed platform of over 65,000 servers in 1,600 locations in 70 countries globally. This means that, using Akamai's network of servers, Standard Chartered can streamline its operations to a single data centre in Asia, while actually delivering secure content more quickly and securely than local hosting.

Furthermore, now that Standard Chartered is able to increase speed of secure content delivery with a streamlined IT infrastructure model, the bank can offer improved online banking services to customers, and open up new markets, more quickly, with little additional cost. When evaluating solutions, Standard Chartered discovered that Akamai Technologies reduced the time it took Indian consumer banking customers to complete a five-step banking process from 70 seconds to 20 seconds. Corporate banking customers in Asia saw a 25% improvement in online performance for Standard Chartered's Straight2Bank application. These improvements led to a 20% increase in the bank's online wholesale banking transaction volume worldwide.

Akamai has worked with Standard Chartered since 2007. Akamai delivers Standard Chartered's public Web site and Straight2Bank commercial banking application. As it rolls out this new retail banking platform, it was only natural to turn to Akamai.

Using Akamai Technologies' platform Standard Chartered Bank has been able to significantly reduce its annual operating costs for hardware, bandwidth, maintenance and disaster recovery, while allowing IT staff to focus on mission-critical tasks. Standard Chartered Bank can now quickly set up services in new global markets at lower costs, giving the bank a distinct competitive advantage as it expands.