AI Search Optimization and SEO Lead

Job Summary

Standard Chartered is looking for an AI Search Optimization and SEO Lead to shape how the Bank’s Wealth and Retail Banking products, propositions and expertise are discovered, understood, cited and recommended across search engines, AI assistants and emerging agentic discovery platforms.
Reporting into the Head of Discovery, the role will accelerate the Wealth and Retail Bank’s evolution from conventional SEO towards Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation. It will strengthen Standard Chartered’s authority and competitive presence across Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek and other AI-led customer journeys.
The WRB Global Digital Sales team’s objective is to partner with country, product, and technology stakeholders to create Discovery programs, content, and experiences that will support the acquisition and engagement of prospects and customers through SC’s Digital Assets. With a customer-centric approach, the team is focused on delivering on the customer intent through its acquisition and deepening strategies while driving profitable acquisitions for the business. Working across priority areas including deposits, cards, lending, wealth management, investments, foreign exchange, insurance and affluent propositions, the role will translate stronger discoverability into qualified demand, customer acquisition, conversion and brand authority.
The successful candidate will build and scale a best-in-class AI Search capability, establishing the operating model, optimization frameworks, governance, measurement approach, and activation roadmap needed to drive business growth. They will foster cross-functional alignment, advance content and technology maturity, and embed strong governance practices to enable responsible, measurable, and sustainable success.
The role will work across Digital Banking, Product, Marketing, Brand, Content, Corporate Affairs, Analytics, Technology, Legal, Compliance, and market teams to shape and scale the AI Search agenda. Success will be driven by strong leadership, strategic influence, and technical expertise, with the ability to align stakeholders, build consensus, and drive execution across a complex global organization.
Strong working knowledge (reading and writing) of Traditional Chinese will be a big plus to support Asia markets.

Key Responsibilities

•    Define and support Standard Chartered’s AI Search Optimization strategy, including AEO, GEO and SEO, aligned with customer needs, business priorities, growth opportunities and the Bank’s digital distribution agenda.
•    Establish the roadmap, operating model and governance framework required to scale AI Search across markets, embedding discoverability, responsible AI, content standards, decision rights, measurement and accountability into business, marketing and digital delivery processes.
•    Develop an enterprise authority and content strategy that strengthens the Bank’s visibility, citation presence, recommendation inclusion and answer ownership across AI platforms and search engines, ensuring content is aligned to customer intent, commercial priorities and conversion outcomes.
•    Partner with Product, Technology and Content teams to enhance discoverability across digital platforms, embedding best practices for SEO, AI accessibility, structured data, information architecture, site performance and machine-readable content.
•    Build prompt, citation and competitive intelligence capabilities to understand how customers discover, evaluate and engage with financial products through AI platforms, translating insights into actionable content, authority-building and distribution strategies.

•    Leverage GenAI and custom AI agents to automate research, content intelligence, technical diagnostics, opportunity identification, workflow optimisation and performance reporting, improving speed, scalability and operational effectiveness.
•    Define and manage a comprehensive measurement and experimentation framework covering AI citations, recommendation presence, answer ownership, organic visibility, customer acquisition, engagement, conversion and brand authority, continuously scaling initiatives that deliver measurable business impact.
Regulatory & Business Conduct
•    Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct. 
•    Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct.
•    Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.

Skills and Experience

Required skills & experience:
•    10+ years’ experience in SEO, organic growth or digital discovery within complex, multi-market organisations.
•    Deep strategic and technical SEO expertise, with practical 12-1 months experience in building AEO, GEO or AI Search programmes.
•    Experience in prompt intelligence, citation intelligence, custom agents, agent orchestration and workflow automation.
•    Proven ability to connect discoverability to qualified demand, acquisition, conversion and brand authority.
•    Strong cross-functional leadership across Product, Marketing, Content, Technology, Analytics, Risk and Compliance.
•    Wealth, Retail Banking or financial-services experience preferred.

•    Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, and Lumar
•    Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Power BI or Looker Studio
•    AI Tools: Profound, SEMrush
•    AI and automation – VS Code, Vibe Coding to support Automation 
•    Traditional Chinese

Qualifications

Education
•    Bachelor's Degree In A Relevant Field of Study
Languages
•    Mandarin, simplified chinese is a plus

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.