22nd March 2023 – Standard Chartered announced the global launch of the working capital and lending capability on its Straight2Bank (S2B) platform, the Bank’s online banking platform for businesses to manage their transaction banking needs.

S2B Loans is a new module which allows clients to initiate and approve new loan drawdown and rollover requests. In addition to providing a real time view of the facility limits and utilisations, clients can also track the maturities of their outstanding transactions and repayment dates through an easy-to-use interface.

By digitising and simplifying the end-to-end exchange of information, clients are able to view real time updates on the progress of their loan requests, thereby benefitting from greater transparency and cost efficiencies across the supply chain.

This capability eliminates the challenges associated with paper-based loan drawdowns, including the inefficient process of physical signatures as well as the manual tracking of limits and transaction status.

S2B loans is now available in the Bank’s key markets, with a progressive roll out across the rest of its footprint.

Jia Yu Liao, Global Head of Working capital, said: “With the launch of our working capital and lending capability on S2B, our clients can now view transaction information across their cash, trade and working capital facilities in a single interface. Not only does this offer a faster and more seamless experience for corporates in making better working capital decisions, the move to a paperless process is also a step forward in our journey towards sustainability.”

Commenting on the new capability, Longhorn Publishers, a Pan-African publishing house who is a pilot client, said: “We would like to commend Standard Chartered for the continued improvement of their S2B platform. The recent digitisation of term loan drawdowns has been a great transformation to us. Some of the immediate benefits we have experienced include time saving, convenience and improved decision making. We are now able to access all facility related information at any time which helps us to plan better, unlike previously where we had to request from the bank which would take some time. This has positively impacted our user experience and is also a great contribution to going green.”

Find out more S2B Loans in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEZlnEISiM0