The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Standard Chartered investing in robots to help cut costs more compliance and regulatory staff Credit: Bloomberg 26 March 2016 • 5:00pm Standard Chartered is moving heavily into radical new technologies that could one day see robots providing bespoke wealth advice and artificial intelligence answering customer questions.
 The emerging markets-focused British bank has set up a new lab called the eXellerator in Singapore in an attempt to bring theoretical ideas from Silicon Valley to life.
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 Banks across the world are hiring more compliance and regulatory staff, leading to a shortfall of suitably qualified workers and spiralling costs.
 To combat this, Standard Chartered wants to run computer systems and artificial intelligence programmes to ensure the regulations are not broken, rather than hiring staff to manually implement them and monitor the results.
 “In the last two or three years, almost all banks have added hundreds or thousands of additional people for compliance, to regulate reporting, regulate compliance – now, banks understand what is going on and want a way to make it more efficient,” said the bank’s global chief innovation officer Anju Patwardhan.
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 Currently a customer typically tells a bank how much risk they are prepared to tolerate in their investment portfolio and the banker – or a machine – matches suitable investments to that risk profile.
 In future, Ms Patwardhan believes artificial intelligence could offer more tailored advice, understanding customers’ end goals.
 “If you moved to using cognitive computing, the computers would give you recommendations based on the data received without you having to disclose anything… the computers are continuously learning,” she said.