How Standard Bank Uses Celonis to Achieve 90%+ STP in Cross-Border Payments

Standard Bank is the largest bank on the African continent, processing 9–11 trillion rand in cross-border payments monthly across more than 20 countries. Despite its scale, the bank operated in a predominantly analog legacy environment—one it had digitized without fundamentally reimagining. As customer expectations shifted and digital-native fintechs intensified competition, leadership recognized that incremental improvements would not be enough. “Africa has the youngest population and the largest population globally,” says Richard de Roos, Head of CIB Operations. “The opportunity is immense and we want to be part of enabling its growth.”

The most acute problem was cross-border payment processing. Standard Bank knew turnaround times were too long—sometimes stretching to 55 hours—but lacked the end-to-end process visibility to understand why. “We didn’t have an end-to-end view of our processes and we couldn’t understand which connected processes are impacting a product or client,” recalls Mosotho Moloi, Head of Process Engineering. Without that visibility, targeted optimization was impossible and fragmented improvement initiatives within the business went unsupported.

With consulting partner ProcessLab, Standard Bank deployed Celonis as its central Process Intelligence platform. The team built a digital twin of the cross-border payment workflow inside Celonis, immediately revealing friction points throughout the process. “We immediately found friction points all over the place,” says William Kent, Head of Payment and Trade Operations. “But we also saw how fixing just one or two things would improve the performance dramatically.” Success with cross-border payments established the proof of concept, and Standard Bank expanded Celonis into the core of an enterprise-wide “Intelligent Processing Model” (IPM) spanning payments, trade products, and investment banking.

The results were transformative. Cross-border payment turnaround times fell from up to 55 hours to a handful of hours, and the straight-through processing rate rose above 90%. Large screens were installed across the Johannesburg headquarters so every employee can monitor live process performance—a change that “created a massively collaborative environment,” according to Kent. The visibility that had been impossible to achieve became the operating standard.

Standard Bank is now rolling out Celonis to the client-facing Finance division, with additional areas to follow. AI features including annotations and copilots are being deployed to further accelerate optimization. De Roos frames the transformation in strategic terms: “Celonis is part of how we run the business. It allows us to leapfrog into the future and to compete with best-practice fintechs globally.” For a legacy institution operating across the complexity of 20+ African markets, Process Intelligence has become the foundation for competing as a digital-first bank.