Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) Korea, originally founded in 1929, offers innovative financial products and services based through its digital platform to both corporates and consumers. SCB Korea is a member of Standard Chartered, an international banking group headquartered in London.

PayKey enables banks to offer their customers instant access to various financial services, including P2P payments, balance check, mobile top-ups, and more, through its proprietary banking keyboard solution. PayKey’s solution has already been launched globally by more than 20 leading banks, including Standard Chartered, ING, Unicredit, among others.

Project scope

PayKey and Standard Chartered Bank Korea partnered to provide instant access to banking services through the keyboard in any mobile app. The banking keyboard serves as a gateway to Standard Chartered’s ‘SC Mobile’ banking app, allowing customers to tap the Standard Chartered banking button to access financial services easily.

This project extended PayKey and Standard Chartered Bank Korea’s existing partnership to launch an upgraded next-generation keyboard solution featuring open banking capabilities. The next-gen solution was designed to leverage the newly introduced open banking platform in South Korea. This solution allows Standard Chartered customers to manage all of their bank accounts through the keyboard in multiple mobile apps such as KakaoTalk, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Naver. The new open banking integration allowed customers to instantly access account balances and transact from multiple checking accounts of different Korean banks, all from the keyboard’s interface.

By integrating with Standard Chartered’s existing mobile app through an SDK, PayKey extended banking services to customers through the keyboard without any modification to the bank’s existing security and privacy protocols, making use of Standard Chartered’s open banking integration in a seamless manner.

The project’s scope further included setting ‘favourite accounts’ allowing customers to predefine shortcuts for frequent payment transfers. Standard Chartered Bank Korea customers can conduct quick and simple transactions with the accounts they frequently transact with this function. The project specifications are the ‘special offers’ bar within the keyboard’s interface, where Standard Chartered Bank Korea can now offer relevant services and promotions to customers through a highly visible interface. Standard Chartered Bank can easily communicate offers to customers in a new dynamic manner through the promotional banner.

Solution implementation

The project was implemented by the Digital and Personal Banking division at Standard Chartered Bank Korea. The project was kicked off in May 2020, with project definition, development, implementation, and testing done between May to August 2020. The project went live in August 2020.

PayKey’s proprietary solution features full keyboard functionality, including state-of-the-art NLP capabilities, delivering a superior keyboard experience that combines everyday typing functions with frequently used banking services. While currently focused on transactions among checking accounts, in the future the solution can extend capabilities to enable access to investment accounts, trading apps, and even non-banking financial services. The solution may also expand its in-app promotion capabilities to provide personalised offers to customers right when they need them in the valuable keyboard interface.

The partnership between Paykey and Standard Chartered Bank Korea has delivered open banking benefits to many customers in Korea. Upon launching, the value of keyboard transactions doubled from the first week of the launch to the fourth week of the launch. The total number of transactions conducted through the keyboard tripled from the launch date of 25 August 2020 to 21 September 2020.

KEY FACTS

Bank: Standard Chartered Bank Korea
Headquarters: South Korea
Solution: PayKey
Timeline: 4 months