Standard Bank of South Africa expands use of Power Platform to enterprise applications

Standard Bank is the largest bank in Africa with a 161-year history, 18 million customers, and 49,000 employees. Standard Bank operates in 20 African countries and has a presence in major international business centers including New York, London, Beijing. Their motto – “Africa is our home; we drive her growth.” Since 2017, Standard Bank has grown their adoption of the Power Platform resulting in over 1,500 solutions for a variety of business needs ranging from finance to operations to HR. 

Back in 2017, a team was formed to find ways to maximize value from their new, Office 365 investment. That’s when they discovered the value of the Power Platform. “We saw Power Apps and Power Automate as hidden gems in our Office 365 subscription. They were just what we needed to increase efficiency and improve our customer and employee experience,” says Richard Blackwell, Standard Bank Infrastructure Management, Employee Experience, Head - Engineering Team at Standard Bank. 

As with many organizations, Standard Bank was getting bogged down with business processes that were often executed using a combination of manual processes, Excel spreadsheets, email and other disparate technologies that did not integrate with each other. The team quickly saw Power Platform as an efficient way to change that. 

An early win with Power Platform 

One of the first applications created by the bank using Power Platform was a mobile app built to support inspections of the bank’s 8,000 ATMs. Back then, these inspections were done on a clipboard and the team was buried in reams of paperwork. Working closely with the business group, it took a small team of developers just 24 hours to create a prototype solution, which was then tested and refined alongside the business. 

The app used the device GPS capabilities to find nearby ATMs and the device camera to take pictures when issues need to be reported. All data was stored in SharePoint Online lists. Power BI dashboards and reports were used to visualize the aggregate data. At its peak, over 300 inspectors used the app to generate over 5,000 inspection reports each month. Watch a demo of the ATM Inspection.

Scaling with a Center of Excellence 

Based on the success of the ATM inspection app and similar early wins, the Power Platform team created a Center of Excellence (CoE) to support further development. Immersion sessions quickly unlocked imaginations. “Employees who had never dreamed of being developers were surprised at how easily they could build solutions with Power Platform to solve their business challenges,” says Blackwell. 

Today the CoE supports over 1,500 citizen developers across the bank’s global network. Business groups are encouraged to work closely with developers on solutions – an operating principle that Blackwell sees as key to the success of the CoE – and the solutions it has supported. “We involve business stakeholder business directly in the planning and development process. Thes are the people who best understand the business challenge – and are most likely to know the specific solution required,” he says. 

While the CoE makes it easy for citizen developers to get started on a solution, governance also remains a top priority. Currently, the bank uses the Data Loss Prevention capabilities of the platform to help prevent users from unintentionally exposing organizational data. Premium licensing allocation is managed carefully. Additionally, development environments are segregated into Production and Non-Production environments for the more substantial solutions. 

To support its drive into enterprise-level apps and drive even more development rigor, the Power Platform team is looking at deploying Managed Environments. This includes pipelines in Power Platform, which will make it easier for more citizen developers to leverage ALM automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities. 

“Our Maker Community is quickly growing in competence and skill - which keeps talent inside the organization and reduces our reliance on augmented resources,” says Clinton Read, Standard Bank Infrastructure Management, Employee Experience Engineering, Lead - Technical Solutions at Standard Bank. 

The next chapter: enterprise level solutions

With a strong CoE in place, the bank has shifted from predominantly building productivity (or last mile) solutions for smaller teams to enterprise or line of business applications. This includes solutions requiring integration with sensitive backend systems.

For example, a solution called “Specter” was designed to establish a reliable and comprehensive golden source for data emanating from certain legal agreements and required for downstream system processes and calculations. The data from these agreements are captured on a model-driven app built using Power Apps, then stored in Dataverse. Approval of the captured agreement triggers a Power Automate flow which packages the agreement details into a .xml format that is pushed into a middleware message queue for consumption by various systems. 

“Given the sensitivity of the data involved, it was imperative to create a solution that guarantees user access only to data meant for their role, while preventing unauthorised access through the use of security roles,” says Read. This is where Dataverse comes in using role based access and integration with Azure Active Directory. 

Another key requirement was the ability to transmit data to downstream systems using various methods. For instance, some systems necessitate real-time data feeds and prefer data to be conveyed via MQ messages, while others may opt for batch uploads during overnight processing. This is done using Azure Logic Apps, where hierarchical customer and country data is synced from on-premises SQL to Dataverse via Power Platform dataflows. 

In another solution, a legacy backend system was replaced altogether specifically to cater for the fluid business environment we now operate in. Data that used to be housed on SAP was migrated to Dataverse to support many offices in other countries that don’t use the system.  The new Power Platform solution standardizes the granting and reporting of Delegation of Authority (DoA) to approve Opex and/or Capex and provides a single view of all DoAs across the group, including automation of material DoA controls. Power Platform has also made it easy to evolve the solution. As Blackwell explains, “With Power Platform, we can make rapid changes and enhancements in an environment where business' requirements change frequently.”

To generative AI and beyond 

As the bank’s Power Platform practice continues to evolve, the team is looking to leverage new Power Platform capabilities such as generative AI. 

Take, for example, their Technology Service Desk bot, which the company calls Karabo (which means “Answer” in the native Tswana language). Karabo merges the capabilities of two, custom-coded bots and was built using Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly, Power Virtual Agents). Currently, Karabo resolves 99% of all employee queries directed at her. By adding Generative Actions in Microsoft Copilot Studio the team hopes to take the performance even further. Here’s how:

Currently, the team tracks all questions that Karabo is unable to answer. This data has revealed that users often seek answers from Karabo not only for internal IT support-related issues but also for more general technology-related questions. With its new generative AI capabilities, Karabo will be able to learn from these unanswered questions to provide more accurate and relevant responses to user inquiries. This advancement will elevate the overall user experience and alleviate the workload of the Employee Experience and Technology Service Desk Team.

Standard Bank is excited about doing even more with the new AI capabilities in Power Platform such as AI Builder. “We believe that our Maker community is poised to expand rapidly as we leverage the generative AI capabilities in Power Platform,” says Blackwell. “The CoE team is pouring effort and attention into this opportunity and embracing the limitless potential it is unlocking.”