The vision was to empower Hong Kong customers to grow and unlock more possibilities by providing a truly digital and personalised banking experience.
The first step, therefore, was to listen to what customers really wanted. Before building, the team reached out to over 2,000 Standard Chartered customers to understand the exiting pain points in the banking journey that they needed to address. This insight underpinned the UX, technology and design to deliver a solution that was effective, trusted, scalable, efficient and attractive to users.
The result was an app-based bank that makes managing money simpler and intuitive, by empowering customers with financial knowledge and providing a ‘one-stop shop’ for all their banking services and lifestyle rewards. This includes goal-oriented spending, shopping calculators and numberless bank cards.
Agile, intuitive delivery
GFT deployed 70 expert engineers, covering cloud engineering, DevOps and microservices, to work with Mox’s in-house team and partners.
With diverse team members and partners dispersed globally, the GFT team had to quickly establish the mindset, structure and ways of working required to ensure seamless project management and communication. As DevOps experts, GFT helped to embed agile methodology and a culture of empowerment and innovation throughout the organisation, enabling the team to deliver the new mobile-only bank in just 18 months – something virtually unheard of in the industry until now.
By helping to create a team of DevOps champions, GFT is also helping to ensure Mox can continue to flex, adapt and pioneer, ensuring its long-term, sustainable growth in this intensely competitive global marketplace.
New technology:
Working alongside the Mox engineers, GFT designed a native bank, operating on Vault – a customised core technology platform from Thought Machine – and deploying it on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based virtual infrastructure, which delivers an integrated banking solution and enabled delivery at a pace.
Vault allows clients to create financial products as Python code, using Thought Machine's smart contracts system.
Accessible to nearly any developer, this ultimately gives Mox direct ownership of the products, and the ability to make changes on their own – meaning product updates can be developed and delivered significantly faster than banks operating on legacy technology.
Collaboration and co-creation are the cornerstone of any GFT engagement, and Mox is no exception. Understanding the power of partnership, GFT also helped establish an ecosystem that would allow Mox to harness the latest technology to build a cutting-edge full-stack bank in record time. For example, Mox was built in collaboration with some of the world’s leading organisations and FinTechs and IT consultants. Their customised APIs help to reduce the number of layers in the banking system, and increase speed, security/compliance and accuracy.
Together, they achieved a fast and personalised customer experience, delivered through:
- AI/machine learning, to strengthen and streamline anti-money laundering compliance and personalise the customer experience.
- A near real-time data catalogue on an event-driven architecture, to ensure continuous compliance and strong data governance.
- Personalisation technologies, including biometric customer onboarding, gamification of brand loyalty via sentiment analysis, machine learning customer segmentation and real-time product funnel data sets to adapt offerings and messaging to the user.
Mox is far more than a mobile platform – it went beyond many other challenger banks by developing an entirely new operating model, including a completely new customer onboarding journey, which can be replicated across markets.