Standard Chartered anticipates artificial intelligence will reshape its global operations, with India becoming increasingly vital as automation redistributes jobs and enhances efficiency across its network.
Standard Chartered expects artificial intelligence to reshape where work is done across its global network, but it sees India becoming more important rather than less. Tanuj Kapilashrami, the bank’s group chief operating officer, said the lender’s headcount in India is likely to keep rising as more complex work is shifted into its shared service centres there.
Kapilashrami said Standard Chartered employs about 22,000 people in its global capability centres in India, which support operations around the world. The bank’s global workforce stands at just over 81,000, and about 50,000 employees have already been trained on AI, underlining how quickly the technology is being pushed through the organisation.
The bank has also been laying out how it expects automation to alter staffing elsewhere. In May, it said it planned to remove close to 8,000 support roles over four years, one of the clearest signals yet from a major international lender that AI could reduce headcount. Other reports have put the figure at more than 7,000 jobs and described the cuts as part of a broader move away from lower-value work towards automation.
Standard Chartered has paired those cuts with a broader push to build AI into daily operations. The bank says its AI approach is designed to make banking faster, safer and more efficient, with tools such as its AI Factory and SC GPT platform supporting tens of thousands of staff across 41 markets. Kapilashrami said the bank is putting guardrails around adoption as it scales the technology and is already seeing productivity gains and improvement in its cost-to-income ratio.
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