What he wants is not another layer of digital banking, but less visible banking altogether. “My dream for the future of digital banking is when digital banking doesn’t exist. It just happens.”
For Standard Chartered, that idea has to work in a business that is getting larger and more expensive to serve. The bank onboarded 275,000 affluent clients in 2025 and brought in US$52 billion ($66.61 billion) in net new money, equal to 14% growth in assets under management (AUM). Affluent AUM reached US$447 billion, up 22% year on year. It has also set a target of attracting US$200 billion in net new money between 2025 and 2029.
While hiring more relationship managers is part of the plan, it will not be enough on its own. Standard Chartered has committed US$1.5 billion over five years to its affluent business, covering product innovation, digital platforms and relationship manager hiring. The bank posted operating income of US$20.9 billion in 2025, up 8% excluding notable items, while wealth solutions had a record year, rising 24%.
The test is whether AI can make the wealth business grow without the cost base rising at the same pace. That means helping advisers spend less time on routine work, reach clients at better moments and use the bank’s data without adding more steps to the job.
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Many financial institutions are still falling short. An EY survey of 100 senior decision-makers at wealth and asset management firms in early 2025 found that 95% had scaled AI across multiple use cases but fewer than 30% reported substantial business impact. The tools are spreading but the gains are harder to find.
The work beneath the interface
Keraine says Standard Chartered has been preparing for this for several years. Much of the work sits behind the scenes, in systems clients do not see but bankers feel when those systems slow them down.
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He describes three layers being built at the same time. Doing them one after another, he says, would leave the bank permanently half-ready. “You need to push all those dimensions at the same time. This requires a lot of synchronisation.”
The first layer is core banking and data centre convergence. The bank recently completed a major overhaul of its core banking systems in Hong Kong, one of its biggest and most complex markets, and moved onto a standardised technology stack that can support AI at scale.
The second is API infrastructure, which is the connective layer that allows AI systems to reach client data and act on it in real time. Keraine expects it to reach full maturity by year-end.
The third is what the bank calls its AI factory, where it accesses models and builds agentic capabilities. These are systems that can carry out multi-step tasks rather than only answer prompts.
Standard Chartered has started turning that groundwork into tools employees can use. For instance, a generative AI assistant inside its myWealth Advisor platform has cut the time relationship managers spend drafting client communications from an average of 30 minutes to seconds.
Microsoft Copilot is also being rolled out across the retail bank’s workforce. The bank is preparing to deploy its first AI agent, which will aggregate investment house views for the chief investment office. That moves the bank closer to AI that does part of the work, rather than only finding information.
For a bank operating across 54 markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the value of AI depends partly on whether it can travel across borders. Regulations, client habits and legacy systems can differ sharply, making standardisation difficult. Keraine argues that Standard Chartered has one advantage. It runs five stock markets on a single mobile code base, allowing new capabilities to be deployed across markets instead of being rebuilt each time.
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The wealth prize
The reason Standard Chartered is pushing this now is simple: the wealth opportunity in Asia is large, and more firms want a piece of it. Asia Pacific is projected to contribute nearly 30% of new global financial wealth by 2028. Singapore is growing faster than Hong Kong as a booking centre for high-net-worth individuals, helped by inflows from China, India and Asean.
Standard Chartered is already the third-largest wealth manager in Asia by AUM. Its affluent AUM has grown at an 11% compound annual growth rate since 2016. However, the competition is not standing still. Regional digital banks, global private banks and technology-led wealth platforms are all chasing the same clients. For Standard Chartered, the aim is to reach clients with the right insight earlier, without waiting for a relationship manager to manually start every conversation.
Keraine’s client-facing AI roadmap starts with something familiar: chat. Earlier versions often struggled to understand what clients needed, pushing them towards human agents. “AI brings that revolution — now bots can handle conversations with humans with more accuracy, speed and responsiveness,” he adds.
From there, the bank wants AI to support wealth conversations before they happen. Clients would receive relevant insights ahead of a meeting with their human relationship manager, so the discussion starts with more context and less catch-up.
The more ambitious step is transactional AI, where a client could execute payments or manage routine financial tasks through a conversation instead of moving across several screens. If it works, the interface becomes less obvious. The task gets done with fewer visible steps.
The industry is not there yet. While 78% of wealth and asset management firms are exploring agentic AI, only 7% have deployed it in production. Standard Chartered is preparing to cross that line with its first agent, and the years of infrastructure work are what make the claim more credible.
People and the growth story
Wealth management is still a people-heavy business. More affluent clients usually mean more relationship managers, more servicing work and a larger cost base. To Keraine, AI is not about cutting that workforce but making it go further. “We have a story of growth. To [continue] growing our business without increasing our cost base at the same velocity, AI is going to help us. It’s really a story about people augmentation.”
The numbers explain the pressure. Costs in the bank’s wealth division rose 5% in 2025, driven partly by relationship manager hiring. Standard Chartered is adding advisers while trying to make each one more productive. The aim is for AI to take on more of the routine work — from drafting client notes to pulling together relevant information — so that advisers can serve more clients with better timing and fewer manual steps.
Keraine is equally clear about where that logic stops. “When the stakes are higher —such as making decisions on long-term wealth planning, property and intergenerational wealth transfer — the human interaction is critical. That’s where we make a difference.” Those decisions carry emotional weight that AI models do not register, financial consequences that are difficult to reverse, and family complexity that resists standardisation. They are precisely the conversations where clients have historically needed, and paid for, human judgment.
Costs and the efficiency test
Operating expenses rose 4% to US$12.3 billion in 2025, with the underlying cost-to-income ratio improving 80 basis points to 59.1%. While that is progress, it is still a modest gain against the scale of spending underway, including Standard Chartered’s US$1.5 billion push into its affluent business. Sustaining it while deploying AI systems that require ongoing governance, maintenance and upskilling is the test that the coming results cycles will begin to answer.
PwC projects that banks which capture AI-driven efficiency gains could reduce their cost-to-income ratios by as much as 3 percentage points. For Standard Chartered, closing that gap while growing the top line at the pace its targets demand would represent a meaningful shift in the economics of wealth banking at scale.
Keraine’s answer to whether that is achievable comes back to integration rather than technology. “People can copy everything that we do. But the way you leverage technology to deliver seamless, instant and differentiating customer experiences (including the experience you design) is really what makes the difference.”
