Having a common technology and operations infrastructurehas been instrumental in Standard Chartered Bank's market-beating performance over the past few years, according to Jan Verplancke, the bank's chief information and group technology officer.

In the latest issue of Banking Technology, Verplanke explains how modernising and centralising the bank's data centres - 95 data centres were brought into two large ones - and the development of a common platform across the group have reaped business benefits.

"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," he says.

Read the full interview here.