A study a few years ago found that the average tenure of a chief information officer these days is around 18 months. Jan Verplancke joined Standard Chartered in 2004, so is coming up to his seventh year as CIO and group technology officer.

During that time, the bank has grown rapidly and one of the roles of technology has been to underpin and enable that change.

In his early years, the task was largely creating an infrastructure, with the intention of modernising and centralising the bank's data centres - 95 data centres were brought into two large ones and a common platform developed for workstations across the group

"One of our strengths is that we have one technology and operations department that services all the segments of the bank, which is quite unique: in most banks the merchant bank will have a group, retail will have a group - and sometimes they won't even talk to each other," he says. "Having one technology and operations group means that whenever we have a request, we can reuse all the components."

With that in place, the past few years have been building on that infrastructure. "The second stage was working with what we had and creating a high level of stability. Pretty much every year we have improved our stability by 50%, and we are now talking very small numbers. In emerging markets there are some things that you don't have a high level of control over, but creating stability across the board is one of the things that contributes positively towards growing the business."

"What we have been able to create is a positive spiral where every year we can increase the number of dollars we can spend to improve our capabilities as a bank, while at the same time, as a percentage of revenue, our cost of technology has decreased every single year. It's a very interesting spiral, because it's not one or the other - you can actually have a decreasing cost, because of the scale effect, while at the same time investing to have more capabilities."

Verplancke is Belgian, which might explain his choice of metaphor to describe the structure that the bank has built: "If you have the infrastructure, and stable applications, then you can create more capability on top. Those are the layers of the cake, and the icing is in the channels - what we are doing with the iPhone, for instance," he says. "You can have a good cake, but the icing is what attracts the customers into the store. It still has to be a good cake, otherwise it will be a one-time visit to the store."

"You have to keep building core capabilities as markets evolve, but at the same time you can give more thought to the innovative aspect, which is particularly important in consumer banking, because it is a commodity product after all."

The integrated approach to technology and business "allows you to make choices that are good for the bank overall", he says. "Geographically, if you want to expand, it sometimes might not look good on the P&L. In India for instance, we are expanding our channels: the business strategy is to attract the premium business, so we have created an image that would actually fit pretty well in Switzerland or London."

That meant installing high-specification ATMs, which "from a cost perspective would probably have looked ugly, but if you look at it more holistically, guess what - the consumer bank is doing very well in India, so it was the right decision for the bank".

"A lot comes from straight-through processing - how much can I do with systems and without people sitting in the background typing things in. Both the business and the back office people have done a good job on that, despite the fact that a lot of the markets are still paper-driven. They're not as sophisticated as you would find in the US or UK, but in China, for instance, STP in cash is about 80%, which is amazing, and in Pakistan, uptake of electronic statements is 70%, which is higher than it is in Hong Kong."

Verplancke says that operating in the markets it does, the bank has to be alert to the unexpected. "You find interesting surprises, which are sometimes environmentally driven For instance, in Dubai there are no street names, so electronic delivery is the only option. It is intriguing to see that it is not the most evolved countries that are adopting new technologies."

This is one reason that the bank tends to approach retail and consumer banking along country-specific lines, but the approach is underpinned by a consistent technology platform. Over the past four years it has rolled-out the core banking system developed in-house to 43 countries. It has also been deploying Siebel On Demand as its customer relationship management system for both consumer and wholesale banking. Verplancke says that this will give a consistent feel for customers. Currently the deployment is more advanced in the wholesale area: on the consumer side the basic customer-facing functions are in place, but some of the more advanced functions that are internal to the bank are not yet operational all in all territories, and there is a couple of year's work to be done before they are.

Over all of this, there is the constantly-changing regulatory environment, which is one area that Verplancke admits to having concerns about, particularly from the perspective of an international bank operating in the emerging markets. "The regulatory climate is changing rapidly," he says. "I sit on our regulatory board for China, and rarely a week goes by without some regulatory change from China - sometimes it's daily."

His concern is not so much that these changes are happening, but that they might be happening differently in different parts of the world. "Whether it's the Fed or the FSA, it's probably not 100% coordinated, shall we say? Where it will go, I don't know."

Going against the recieved wisdom, Verplancke is not concerned about the regulatory burden on the grounds of expense. "I can't say that it has impacted our costs, because our costs are lower than were as we've become more efficient, but I am concerned that there may be contradictions - where do you go if you are in a multinational environment?"

The agility that having a stable, unified platform gives means that new technologies can be embraced easily. Standard Chartered has recently made a bit of a splash with iPhone applications, but it is not just the newness that interests him - in fact he is somewhat dismissive of the device per se. "What the iPhone has really done is make 3G networks look like less of an investment looking for an application and the device - or the ease of use of the device - has allowed the users to do things that they wanted to, but couldn't - that's what will create something new."

By creating a need for data that the 3G networks can supply, the iPhone has opened the floodgates to applications of all sorts, and while the headlines are about the consumer banking applications, Verplanke says the true revolution will be in areas such as wholesale and private banking and trade finance.

"I can see someone walking around their warehouse with a 3G iPad, using our Straight2Bank facility, looking at the Letters of Credit, seeing when the goods will be released - that is handy. It is things that we had thought about before, but that were still cumbersome to execute - you had to go to your PC and log in ... now you can make it easy and transparent."

It is not just on the customer-facing or product end that he sees the impact of ubiquitous internet access. "We are looking at it internally too: people in sales shouldn't have to come into the office, they should be on the road with their customers. We have one project looking at them working from home, accessing the CRM applications and entering where they were, what meetings they were having."Such things have been done before, but the ease of implementing them - and the way a generation is growing up expecting them - are what Verplancke sees in the future. "If we don't try it, we may not be able to cater for the next generation of people and the way they want to work."