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BPO arm Scope will render expertise in the venture

Bijoy Ghosh

All under one roof: Mr Peter Flavel (left), Global Head, The Standard Chartered Private Bank, and Mr Sreeram Iyer, Chief Executive Officer, Scope International, at a press conference in Chennai on Monday. —

Our Bureau

Chennai, July 9 Standard Chartered Bank today announced that it had set up its global private banking hub in Chennai, under its wholly owned, captive, BPO subsidiary, Scope International Private Ltd.

The bank has private banking operations in ten cities across the globe (more coming up) and the Chennai hub would handle all the transaction processing, Mr Peter Flavel, Global Head, The Standard Chartered Private Bank, said at a press conference here today.

He said that Scope was initially set up as a cost arbitrage opportunity by offshoring processes, but “has evolved into a centre of expertise, providing risk-controlled process efficiency.”

Today, it processes 80 million transactions for Standard Chartered Bank annually.

In an informal chat with Business Line, Mr Sreeram Iyer, CEO, Scope, ruled out the company offering its services for third parties, as there was more work to do for Standard Chartered Bank itself.

Private banking is much the same as wealth management services, but refers to a higher level of service for higher networth individuals, with investible wealth of over $1 million.

Standard Chartered Bank has been offering wealth management services to its customers in India for a number of years and today manages around Rs 10,000 crore for them. But only recently the bank has started the more specialised ‘private banking’ service. This service is available for clients in Mumbai and Delhi and would be extended to six other cities shortly.

Mr Flavel said that there were 1-lakh Indians worth more than $1 million (Rs 4 crore). The market is still “nascent”, he said. Giving some statistics and characteristics of high networth individuals (HNIs), Mr Flavel said that globally there were about 9.5 million HNIs, a third of whom lived in Asia and West Asia.

Most of these 3 million people have about 40 per cent of their assets in cash. About 80 per cent of their wealth is invested in their own country. More than 70 per cent of the HNIs have less than half their assets placed with private banks.

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