Case Study: Standard Bank boosts agility and productivity and scales BI to 20,000 users with Microsoft Power Apps

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

Standard Bank, Africa’s largest lender, struggled with 150+ years of legacy systems, siloed data, and heavy on‑premises maintenance that limited analytics and business agility. To modernize, the bank adopted Microsoft solutions — notably Microsoft Power Apps alongside Power BI, Azure (Data Lake Storage, SQL Database, Cognitive Services, Machine Learning), and Microsoft 365 — to move data to the cloud and give business users self-service tools.

Using Microsoft Power Apps to automate workflows and Power BI/Azure for a cloud data platform, Standard Bank built a BI center of excellence that standardized gateways, migrated key data to Azure, and enabled user-driven reporting. The Microsoft-powered solution now supports more than 20,000 users with a small central team (around 11–17), drove Power BI adoption to over 20% of the organization and more than doubled user adoption, and lets users create dashboards in under three minutes via Q&A, while a growing community (2,500+ users) continues to scale the program.

Standard Bank

Werner Louw

Head of BI and Data Discovery