Case Study - Standard Chartered Bank

Developing a higher-value global solution

Summary

Standard Chartered Bank has opened a Shared Services Center in Chennai, India to provide HR services to its globally dispersed workforce.

Group head of human resources Tim Miller and PK Medappa, group head, HR service delivery, describe the process for creating the center, stressing the importance of allocating high-potential HR staff to the transition process and of outstanding project management.

Introduction

For Standard Chartered Bank, there have been tangible benefits from adopting a shared services approach to HR. Annualised cost savings led to $8 million going straight to the bottom-line in year one. A portion of this saving has then been reinvested into creating higher value-adding HR products and services, such as fashioning a robust leadership development capability and the expansion of its graduate recruitment structure.

With 2002 net revenues of $4.539 million Standard Chartered is aspiring to be the world's best international bank, leading the way in Asia, Africa and the Middle East serving both consumer and wholesale customers. It employs 29,000 people in more than 50 countries. HR headcount is about 400.

Center location

Based in Chennai, the organization's global shared service center has been operational since March 2001 employing nearly 2500 staff and providing a variety of transactional processing services to the Bank's front office operations. The HR Shared Services center is a part of the Global Shared Service center and has a staff complement of about 150.

The bank chose Chennai as the location for the global shared service center following an analysis of 11 cities against criteria such as cost, quality of the labour force, political stability and infrastructure. Chennai and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia emerged as the two most favourable cities. A smaller center, for high value transaction processing is located in Kuala Lumpur.

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