A Global Bank Reinvents Work for the AI Era
Standard Chartered, one of the world’s oldest and most globally connected banks, is taking a radical step into the future of work. With 85,000 employees across 53 markets, the British multinational has launched an internal transformation that redefines what a job means. Instead of being confined to fixed job titles, employees now operate inside what the bank calls a “skills-powered organization,” where every worker can act like a gig worker.
At the center of this shift is the bank’s Talent Marketplace, an internal digital platform that lets employees take on short-term projects beyond their normal roles. The result is a workforce that behaves more like an in-house gig economy than a traditional corporate hierarchy.
“We’re moving away from the idea that a traditional job is the currency of work,” said Tanuj Kapilashrami, Standard Chartered’s chief strategy and talent officer. “You don’t have to think of an individual by the job title or the job description, but you think of an individual as a collection of skills.”
How the Internal Gig Economy Works
The Talent Marketplace, launched in 2020, is designed to break down silos within the bank. Employees create digital profiles that list their abilities—ranging from data analytics to communications—rather than their titles or departments. Managers across the organization post “gigs,” short-term assignments that require specific skills not available within their immediate teams.
Artificial intelligence matches these opportunities to employees who have the right skill sets or the potential to develop them. Workers can then volunteer to spend up to eight hours per week on these additional projects. Examples include a compliance specialist helping to design an AI ethics framework, a marketing manager supporting a fintech initiative, or a data analyst teaching coding to a regional team.
The gigs are unpaid but carry other incentives. Employees see them as opportunities to gain experience, build networks, and transition into emerging “sunrise” roles. “People are realizing that the world is changing very quickly,” said Kapilashrami. “They are choosing employers that will invest in their career development and growth.”
According to the bank, over 60 percent of its global workforce actively participates in the marketplace, and nearly 40 percent have developed “Skills Passports” that document their competencies and link to learning opportunities. Internal deployment—the share of roles filled by existing employees—has risen to more than 50 percent, up from about 30 percent in 2023.
The Economic and Strategic Logic Behind the Shift
The transformation began in 2019 when Kapilashrami presented a sobering analysis to the board: thousands of roles at Standard Chartered were likely to disappear within the next decade due to automation and changing client demands. These “sunset jobs” were expected to fade away in waves over three, five, and eight years, replaced by new “sunrise jobs” that would demand very different skills.
To adapt, the bank needed to reskill rather than replace. “We showed what it was going to cost the business over the next five years to remove all the sunset jobs and hire for the sunrise jobs,” said Kapilashrami. “That’s when the management team, starting with our CFO, began to get very interested.”
Her data told a clear story: reskilling and redeploying an existing employee saved an average of $49,000 compared to external hiring. By expanding the Talent Marketplace and retraining programs, Standard Chartered estimates it has saved more than $55 million in hiring costs since 2023.
The bank’s leaders also realized that reskilling had social and cultural benefits. Many of the new roles were technical, such as data science or cybersecurity, where female representation was historically low. By training existing staff, the bank could promote gender balance and preserve institutional knowledge.
Preparing for an AI-Driven Future
While the Talent Marketplace predates the recent explosion of artificial intelligence, it has become a central part of Standard Chartered’s response to it. “Companies that want to move quickly on AI have to think holistically about the skills of the workforce they have before knowing where they need to hire,” said Kapilashrami. “There is a massive skill shortage, and if businesses feel that they are just going to be able to buy their way into how business models are changing, it’s just not going to happen.”
AI now plays a dual role at the bank. It is both a disruptive force and a tool to help employees stay relevant. The Talent Marketplace uses AI to personalize recommendations, match workers to gigs, and identify training needs. It links directly with the bank’s learning platform, which hosts “Future Skills Academies” in areas such as cybersecurity, sustainability, and data management.
Kapilashrami said AI is helping to “hyper-personalize” the employee experience. “It’s able to take HR technology and make it far more interesting and fun,” she explained. “GenAI augments employees’ performance feedback, making it more actionable and linking it to our learning library.”
The system has already drawn thousands of participants: 38,000 employees engaged in future-skills learning in 2024 alone, and 26,000 used the Talent Marketplace to complete 2,500 internal projects. These short-term collaborations have unlocked an estimated $8.5 million in productivity by filling skill gaps that might otherwise have required new hires or outside contractors.
Reimagining Management and Culture
The move to a skills-based organization has forced Standard Chartered to rethink how it evaluates and manages people. The traditional alphanumeric performance-rating system has been replaced with continuous feedback and annual 360-degree reviews. Managers now focus on collecting input from peers, clients, and partners to assess development rather than assign grades.
“The shift challenges the traditional parameters of the line manager role,” Kapilashrami said. “We’re redefining what it means to lead teams when talent can flow across departments.”
Psychological safety has also become a core focus. According to the bank, teams that actively engage in two-way feedback see up to a 20-point increase in psychological safety scores, which correlates with higher innovation and lower attrition.
Industry Reactions and the Broader Trend
Standard Chartered’s approach has attracted attention from academics and business leaders alike. Hatim Rahman, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said internal marketplaces are gaining traction across industries as companies grapple with AI disruption. “The main benefit is employee retention,” he said. “Workers who can flex and upskill across an organization are less likely to leave for those opportunities elsewhere.”
Pharmaceutical company Moderna has followed a similar path, restructuring teams not just by roles but by the capabilities of both people and AI systems. Rahman noted that while most companies originally built these systems to improve engagement, they have become “incidentally helpful” in absorbing the shock of automation.
However, critics warn that such models could blur the boundary between full-time employment and freelance work. Labor advocates worry that if corporations begin labeling employees as “gig workers,” even internally, it could eventually erode job stability and benefits. Some also question whether the constant competition for internal gigs might create stress or inequality between employees with different visibility or networking advantages.
A Glimpse of What’s Coming Next
For now, Standard Chartered insists that the experiment is about empowerment, not exploitation. Kapilashrami believes it gives employees “the chance to chart their own learning and career paths” in a world where technology evolves faster than job descriptions.
Still, the implications reach far beyond banking. As AI reshapes industries from law to logistics, the concept of the permanent job may give way to a more fluid, task-based model. Standard Chartered’s early move suggests that even large, regulated institutions can pivot to this new reality if they are willing to rewire how they think about talent.
If the industrial age was built on fixed roles and hierarchies, the AI age may be built on fluid skills and short-term collaborations. Standard Chartered’s internal gig economy offers a glimpse of what that future could look like—a world where everyone is, in some sense, a gig worker, even inside the walls of a global bank.
NP Editor: This seems a bit disingenuous to me. First of all you can’t run a company this way, real work requires corporate memory, proper security and commitment, none of which are fostered here. This seems like a good short term strategy in preparing to downsize, optimizing the use of the employees who may disappear soon.
I’m thinking this is not really the future of corporations. Perhaps gigging will be more important in the future, but it will be as organized, nor as pretty as this example. Managers will be selected for their ability to manage outsiders while completing the mission of the corporation. The core employee force will be smaller.
