SC Ventures

Standard Chartered Ventures combines an internal venture-building operation, a corporate venture capital organization, and a digital platform to link challenges with solutions. Its purpose is to accelerate the bank’s transformation in the digital age by promoting experimentation with new business models and technologies outside the bank’s traditional structure and processes. The case explains the raison d’etre of SCV and how its three complementary activities are carried out. It poses the question of how to evolve its digital platform to a decentralized ecosystem that could foster valuable information flows and increase solutions exponentially by multiplying connections between participants.

To show how a bank facing digital disruption created a separate entity to promote entrepreneurship, innovation, and ecosystem management to transform and become more future-ready. To spur debate about whether its three core activities are complementary and coherent. To stimulate discussion about how to build a critical mass of ecosystem players around a digital platform and how to derive value from the investment.