Case Study: Standard Bank achieves greater agility and productivity with Microsoft Power BI

South African bank increases agility and productivity with Power BI and Azure

Standard Bank, Africa’s largest lender, faced legacy systems, siloed data, and heavy on‑premises maintenance that limited analytics and slowed business change. To modernize analytics and empower users across 20 countries, Standard Bank adopted Microsoft Power BI (together with Azure services such as Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure SQL Database) and established a centralized BI center of excellence to drive cloud migration and self-service analytics.

Using Microsoft Power BI, supported by Azure, Microsoft 365, Teams, and Power Apps, Standard Bank built a governed platform with enterprise and productivity gateways, automated workflows, and a strong user community. The approach lets an 11‑person COE support more than 20,000 users, with over 20% of the bank using Power BI after three years; BI+ initiatives more than doubled adoption, Q&A lets dashboards be created in under three minutes, and a 2,500+ user community helps scale support so the team can focus on strategic investments.

Standard Bank

Werner Louw

Head of BI and Data Discovery