Governing retail publishing across 29 markets

Challenge

Global publishing within regulated workflows

Standard Chartered’s retail banking websites serve customers across markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The publishing operation has to support local content while meeting the workflows, compliance requirements and access controls of a regulated international bank. In 2015, the bank began moving its retail web publishing from a proprietary content-management system to WordPress.

The programme needed one foundation for a large distributed publishing community without forcing every team into a disconnected local solution. It also needed to integrate specialist banking content and data while preserving the governance expected across the wider web estate. The resulting system became known as the Unified Digital Platform.

Solution

A shared WordPress platform for distributed teams

WordPress provided the common publishing layer, with workflows and user roles configured around the bank’s operating requirements. Shared integration capabilities kept new services connected to that foundation instead of extending the earlier fragmentation. The platform supported local publishing across 29 markets while giving the bank a common way to manage access and content operations.

One extension brought a wealth-commentary service into the WordPress platform so publishers and advisers could collaborate on market publications. The work mapped complex taxonomies, external financial data, publication templates and chart types into a shared editorial process. Publishers and advisers could therefore assemble commentary and market data together instead of maintaining the publication on a separate proprietary system. A separate fund-library project moved another externally managed experience toward the same CMS strategy while retaining a specialised frontend architecture.

The platform handled content for 90% of the bank’s web traffic and supported 1,575 back-end content editors and platform users. It delivered 350 million page views annually across the retail platform. Regional publishers worked through common access controls and workflows, while wealth commentary and fund-library services could join the same CMS strategy instead of remaining separate systems.

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