Gurdeep Singh Kohli is one of the founding members of SC Ventures, the innovation arm of UK-headquartered multinational bank Standard Chartered. He was part of the team joining CEO Alex Manson in the very early days of setting up the unit’s operations in 2018.
SC Ventures takes a slightly different approach to venturing than many other corporate venturing teams. The unit has three strands under its remit of operations: an investment arm; an intrapreneurship programme and fi ntech platform; and a venture building operation. The biggest share of the portfolio today is focused on the venture building activities rather than on the equity investment side. Most of the roughly 100-person team at SC Ventures also works to support the venture building operations.
Based in the UK, Kohli, who carved out a key role in setting up the venture building operations in Singapore, now leads SC Ventures in Europe and the Americas. He firmly believes that making equity investments alone is not enough to be truly transformational for the parent company.
“You can make minority investment in companies which can be successful in its own right. It is unclear how much the corporation gets out of it. But if you want to drive serious transformation and change in culture, and disrupt from within, you have to do new business building,” Kohli recently told Global Corporate Venturing in an interview.
In addition to having multiple innovation tools, Manson and Kohli also wanted to ensure the unit would not be seen as just an experiment by the bank. They believed that corporate venturing units that were seen as small and marginal could be easily shut down when there was a management change or a downturn.
As such, SC Ventures always set itself up to do venture building on an industrial scale. Where many corporate venture builders will create just one or two new startups at a time, SC Ventures has created more than 15 businesses in its more six years of operation. It always has a pipeline of around the same number of ventures in different stages of incubation, says Kohli.
“You can make minority investment in companies which can be successful in its own right. It is unclear how much the corporation gets out of it. If you want to drive serious transformation and change in culture, and disrupt from within, you have to do new business building”
The portfolio is distributed across four themes, which the team believes will shape the future of banking: online economy and lifestyle; digital assets; small and medium enterprises and world trade; and sustainability and inclusion. Some of the most successful projects it has built to date include the digital banks Mox and Trust, banking-as-a-service platform Audax, digital assets custody platform Zodia Custody and B2B commerce marketplace Solv.
There are several factors that have allowed SC Ventures to scale its operations and build so many startups at the same time. Support from the group CEO and senior leadership for the venture team’s long-term vision has been key. At the outset, SC Ventures established a differentiated and dedicated governance model for its ventures. It adopts a stage-gated approach to building new businesses, tying funding to delivering key results and rewarding venture teams with employee share option plans. One of the unit’s key principles has been to ensure the ventures are independent in many ways and operate under a separate legal entity and brand.
SC Ventures is a big believer in co-creation and is open to working in partnership with like-minded institutions to build and scale new business models. This is what Kohli spends most of his time doing – meeting potential partners.
He serves on the board of a few ventures across the UK, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. He is also responsible for overseeing SC Ventures’ strategy and intrapreneurship efforts within the bank.
Kohli has more than 20 years of experience of working in fi nancial services strategy, innovation and venture building. Prior to joining SC Ventures in 2018, he was a managing director in Standard Chartered Bank’s group strategy team and led a variety of strategic discussions for the bank’s management team and the board.
He started his career with McKinsey & Co in India in 2001, before joining Credit Suisse’s corporate development and strategy group from 2008 to 2011. However, he maintains that it is the role at SC Ventures that has helped him reinvent himself, not just once but a number of times.
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