In the AI race, a global bank bets on the human touch

For all the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to transform the financial sector, one of the world’s largest multinational banks believes that customers will still want to talk to a human.

During a recent fireside chat at the Gitex AI Asia 2026 conference in Singapore, Alvaro Garrido, a senior executive at Standard Chartered, outlined how the financial institution is managing the deployment of AI across its global footprint.

Rather than view the technology merely as a tool for mass automation and cost-cutting, Garrido, the bank’s chief operating officer for technology and operations and CIO for information security and data, described it as an “injection of support” for the bank’s workforce. To that end, the company has enrolled some 80,000 employees in internal AI training programmes, of which roughly 33,000 have already completed coursework.

“We always debated whether it’s a technology-driven journey, an output-driven journey or a cost-reduction journey,” Garrido told Zina Cinker, a condensed matter physicist and exponential technology strategist, who moderated the discussion. “For us, we put the individual at the centre, because people are actually driving the transformation in the bank.”

The financial sector has long been perceived as traditional and risk-averse, dealing intimately with people's livelihoods. Yet beneath the surface, Standard Chartered is integrating AI and machine learning deep into its operations. Beyond front-end customer service, the bank is also using the technology to power self-healing infrastructure that detects system anomalies and to combat sophisticated financial crime and fraud.

But when it comes to sensitive decisions such as credit assessments, the bank remains cautious. “For every process that we are injecting AI into, we absolutely make sure that all the ethical evaluations for any model [are done] to mitigate bias. We like to believe that there’s always a human in the loop,” Garrido said.

Paradoxically, he added, applying the technology rigorously could eventually lead to a “much more objective way to deliver credit” by analysing data points that human loan officers might overlook.

Operating in highly regulated markets – from the UK and the United Arab Emirates to China and Singapore – presents a patchwork of regulatory frameworks for any global bank. However, Garrido praised the Monetary Authority of Singapore as one of the most progressive and decisive regulators in the world, noting that the agency’s speed often challenges the bank to innovate faster just to keep up.

To manage cross-border deployment complexities, Standard Chartered builds its AI capabilities on a centralised, highly standardised technology foundation, leaving localised customisation to regional teams. The bank has also developed safe ways for teams to train AI models using production data, rather than relying on the synthetic or obfuscated data used in the past.

Yet, even with internal safeguards, the rapid adoption of AI brings significant risks. As an executive who also oversees the bank’s cyber security operations, Garrido said his primary concern remains the fragility of the financial and technology supply chain.

“We do not operate in isolation,” he said, pointing to the bank’s reliance on software vendors and its supplier relationships with Wall Street counterparties. “That entire ecosystem is only as strong as the weakest link.”

Ultimately, Garrido argued that AI will handle the laborious data crunching, such as analysing a client's risk appetite and market performance, so that human relationship managers can spend more time advising their clients.

Looking ahead, Garrido predicts a future where AI becomes so integral to business operations that dedicated executive roles for AI may become obsolete.

“There’s not going to be a head of AI,” Garrido said, adding that just as compute is now embedded in everyday life, AI will soon just be the way business is done. “It’s still a little bit of a retrofit, still getting into an existing process, and that’s going to go away. Start thinking AI first, rather than as an afterthought.”