The Customer

Standard Chartered Bank is a leading multinational financial services company headquartered in London, UK which provides consumer, corporate and institutional banking and treasury services. It operates a network of over 1,700 branches and outlets in more than seventy countries and employs approximately 80,000 people across the globe.

THE PROBLEM AND THE FOLIO3 SOLUTION

The bank wanted to setup an innovation group in Silicon Valley to develop customized mobile apps that would help make life easier for its employees. They chose Folio3 to be part of this cutting edge group, based on Folio3’s experience in developing mobile apps, expertise in enterprise systems and reputation for delivering high quality solutions. Based on the bank’s requirements and suggestions, Folio3 developed a suite of innovative and unique, native iPhone apps for the bank’s employees including the following:

Acronyms

An app that allows bank employees to instantly look-up any acronym on their iPhones, to see if it corresponds to any term in the financial services industry. Employees can also add acronyms to the app’s database, which are then available to other bank employees.

Office Finder

An app that uses the iPhone’s GPS and Mapping functionality to help employees locate branch offices when traveling. The app’s database contains details of all the bank’s offices across the globe, making it a useful tool for employees when traveling.

Bridges

An app that enables employees to dial into the bank’s conference bridges with a single tap on their iPhones; by utilizing the iPhone’s GPS functionality to automatically detect the user’s location and dial into the appropriate conference bridge. It also provides reminders for upcoming meetings. Employees can add / save new bridge data (bridge dial-in no., pin, etc.) into the app, or import meetings & bridge details from their calendars.

Conference Room Booker

An app that enables bank employees to book conference rooms by scanning a QR code outside each conference room, via the iPhone’s camera. Employees can check conference room availability, book rooms immediately or reserve them for a future date.

Client Glance

An app developed for the bank’s Relationship Managers, allowing them to view a client’s latest financial data (such as contact details, stock value, relationship limits, revenues, RWA, etc.) before visiting them.

All of the above apps feature over-the-air (OTA) updates and notify bank employees of any available critical or incremental updates, which can then be downloaded OTA from secure servers.

Thanks to Folio3’s developed suite of native iPhone apps, the bank has been able to substantially improve its overall employee productivity, while meeting the stringent security requirements demanded by its industry.

TECHNOLOGY USED

These native iOS apps were built with Objective C, using Apple’s Xcode integrated development environment (IDE). Xcode is Apple’s standard for developing software for the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems.

All of the above apps took 3 to 4 weeks to develop, using the SCRUM agile software development processes.