Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services: Accelerating Innovation For Sustainable Growth | BRK232

Hello everyone, my name is Satish Thomas. I'm the Vice President for Microsoft Industry Clouds and Solutions. Today I'm excited to talk about our industry clouds, and specifically in this session, the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. You'll meet our team behind this industry cloud for an overview of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and some customer and partner stories.

Around the world, we're experiencing new challenges in today's business environment. The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption by financial institutions and their customers. This means investing in people and their capacity to create new solutions to meet challenges of a rapidly changing economy. Our deep commitment to industry is not new, but it's taken on a new sense of urgency, and we're committed to helping every organization to use technology to improve time to value, increase agility, and reduce costs.

We recognize that every industry is unique. Our aim is to deliver solutions tailored to their specific needs. I'm proud to announce that today the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is generally available. Furthermore, at this event, we're also announcing the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit that is generally available, and we're previewing the Microsoft Cloud for Retail and Manufacturing.

Every industry cloud has three foundational pieces: data, capabilities, and partners. It all starts with data. We're investing both in industry data models and data connectors to bring in high-value data to power business processes tailored for industries. These new industry clouds bring together the breadth of our offerings across the Microsoft Cloud: Azure, Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365.

At the top, we've added new capabilities, connectors, analytics, and AI models unique to each industry. Finally, our industry clouds can be augmented by an unmatched global ecosystem of trusted partners. We work with leading ISVs and systems integrators so our customers in every region have comprehensive solutions they need to address their unique business challenges.

We're bringing all of these investments together in an end-to-end vision to help financial institutions with their digital transformation. The beauty of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is that we can meet you where you're at. We can start with your greatest pain points and identify how to best overcome them first, and then you can continue the journey with us to identify other areas to transform customer engagement and optimize your operations.

Now let's take a look at how this would work for the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and what's under the hood. With that, over to you, Ronnie.

Thank you, Satish. Top of mind today is the way the pandemic has shifted the industry. We've heard from banks like you that you are looking for support with the following priorities: customer engagement, employee experience, value creation, fraud protection, security, and compliance. In response to current concerns of financial institutions, Microsoft has prioritized developing services specific to the industry.

Today I'm excited to share the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, built on a foundation of privacy, security, and regulatory compliance across Microsoft and partner ecosystems. As with all our offerings here, we are focused on trust, and we adhere to security and privacy standards to place you in control over security, encryption, and governance.

In addition, the Cloud for Financial Services is built on an industry data model, which helps ease interoperability and unifies data to accelerate insights and business workflows. Built on this essential foundation, the Cloud for Financial Services helps manage data to deliver differentiated experiences, empower employees, and help combat financial crime.

Now let's take a closer look at the capabilities around the value chain. We start with delivering a differentiated customer experience and empowering employees. We recognize that these are intertwined, so we've created capabilities that are just as effective for each.

First, we have unified customer profile, offering employees a comprehensive view of the customer to tailor customer experiences. Next, we have customer onboarding to help streamline the loan process to help enhance customer experience and loyalty. Collaboration Manager is another key capability, enabling automation, collaboration, and communications to accelerate lending processes.

Banking customer engagement introduces relevant financial information while engaging customers on their preferred channel to reduce time to resolution. Up next, we focus on combating financial crime. We have two connected capabilities here. The first is digital account protection, helping to prevent fraudulent account creation and takeover. And the purchase protection, improving merchants' experiences to increase revenue and retention.

Our offering wouldn't be complete without robust security and compliance capabilities. We offer regulatory compliance assessments to evaluate, monitor, and help improve compliance posture with global, regional, and industry regulations and standards. Risk assurance and support is a white-glove service to support risk, audit, and compliance teams in addressing financial services regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, and privacy.

These capabilities are built on a few key foundational elements that are tailored to the financial services industry. Data model and connectors enable the connection between our capabilities and your data and ensure interoperability of our solutions with your solutions and partner solutions.

This brings me to my next point. The power of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services doesn't stop with our first-party technologies and solutions. Our extensive ecosystem of partners expands the cloud's capabilities even further, ensuring you can find a solution to fit your needs that is built on our technologies. And beneath it all is the Microsoft Cloud. You can depend on our trusted cloud services to power all of these capabilities.

Let's take a closer look at the capabilities that improve customer and employee experiences to offer a consistent journey. First, unified customer profile helps to personalize and suggest relevant offers. When customers respond to these offers, customer onboarding helps simplify and accelerate the process. Collaboration Manager then helps employees partner together and share information to address customer interest more efficiently. And finally, banking customer engagement helps to keep customers informed and supports them during servicing.

You can mix and match these capabilities to create scenarios that are relevant to your business. No matter which you choose to leverage, they work together to help create a unified journey for both your employees and your customers.

Let's take a closer look at the unified customer profile. This capability helps to tailor customer experiences with a comprehensive view of the customer's financial situation and preferences. With a unified customer profile, banks like yours can take advantage of cross-sell and upsell opportunities, helping to increase customer lifetime value and loyalty.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, our customer data platform, you can connect tools across your bank using a wide range of connectors. Then mix, match, and merge functionality helps to unify customer information across these tools. It also allows you to add AI models so you can enrich this data.

The summary view captures a single, unified yet intuitive view of the customer's financial situation, including life events and household information, so you can quickly know your customers and personalize their experiences. By grouping customers into banking segments that share similar attributes, like financial standing, we help agents focus on the right customers and offer opportunities to increase success.

Finally, likelihood to churn is powered by an AI model tailor-built for banking. This empowers agents to understand the customer's likelihood to leave the bank, helping to take preemptive measures. Now let's look how this comes to life in a quick demo. Matthew, over to you.

Our customer onboarding capabilities provide customers with easy access, loan apps, and self-service tools to help streamline the loan process as well as enhance customer experience and loyalty, all the while increasing organizational and employee productivity. An accelerated application process helps to improve loyalty and satisfaction by enabling customers to efficiently apply for and keep track of a loan application.

Loan process management helps to increase productivity and ensure consistent customer experiences by enabling loan managers to monitor and verify the loan application via a single streamlined experience. Let's follow the next steps of our demo story and learn how customer onboarding helps your customer get an outstanding experience from her bank. Back to you, Matthew.

Now let's take a look at Collaboration Manager. Collaboration Manager is a loan management solution designed to help banks seamlessly bring collaboration into their lending workflows, improving process orchestration from front office to back office and facilitating omnichannel communications with customers. Collaboration Manager helps improve organization and employee productivity, unlock value creation, and enhance customer experience.

Here's just a few of the highlights. For lending automation, intelligent tools can help orchestrate lending process and streamline automation. They aggregate data from existing systems and pre-built connectors so you can use low-code and pro-code tools to bring them together. Cross-team collaboration: intelligent dashboards help empower teams to collaboratively manage lending volume and centralize task and file management to enhance productivity. And lastly, communications: with communication features, you can help support customers virtually while meeting security and compliance needs.

Let me show you what Collaboration Manager looks like in our demo. What's great about everything that you've seen so far is that they can easily be brought inside of Microsoft Teams using Collaboration Manager. Here we're seeing Collaboration Manager for loans. We see reports on all the loans that are currently active along with the list that we've seen before.

Thank you, Matthew. Now let's look at banking customer engagement solution. Effectively engaging with customers and their preferred channel has heightened importance with many in-person interactions being replaced by digital ones. With our banking customer engagement capabilities, we help you personalize customer interactions. This can help empower employees with relevant financial information to engage with customers on their preferred channel in a meaningful way.

Financial standing information enables meaningful engagements, driving quickly towards resolution. Financial KPIs, including banking segments and churn risk, empower service agents to personalize these interactions. Omnichannel experiences powered by Dynamics reduce churn by facilitating a continuous experience across channels, including voice and messaging.

Let's take a final look at the demo story to see how this comes to life. Banking customer engagement is built on top of the Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service. While I'm chatting here with Hayden, his financial situation is made available to me in the flow of my work so that I can quickly address his questions. Hayden is asking about his Visa card. I can see that it's not activated and immediately provide him with this information.

With multi-session support, I can also switch over to Amber, and again, Amber's financial situation is made available to me in the chat. Furthermore, if I want to see more details about Amber, I can open her contact summary. Here, financial information is presented again, as well as life events. By using the same information across unified customer profile and the banking customer engagement, we help ensure that all of the bank employees have the same view of the customer to offer consistent and meaningful experiences.

Our industry data model enables interoperability and unified data to help accelerate insights and business workflows. Industry data models offer a common data model with financial services-specific semantics. The data model ingests, enriches, and unifies data to break down data silos and ease interoperability through industry-specific pre-built connectors. By building on top of the data model, you can extend the value of the platform with additional solutions, analytics, and predictions.

Our solution center offers customers a single place to discover, try, and deploy Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. Solution center supports setup for all solution capabilities across Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure, making it easy for any organization to quickly set up and test the available capabilities and plan for their deployments. Solution center also offers documentation and a unified support experience across all Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services capabilities. And now back to Satish to learn more about how our partners and customers are leveraging those capabilities for their digital transformation.

Thank you, Ronnie and Matt, for demoing these new capabilities to help us see the possibilities that these industry clouds bring. There's no better showcase than Virgin Money. As a top digital bank anchored in customer experience, they know better than anyone the importance of using technology to wow their customers. With that, let's roll the video.

Hi, I'm Fraser Ingram. I'm the Chief Digital and Innovation Officer for Virgin Money. Virgin Money is the sixth-largest bank in the UK. We have over six million customers. We're part of the Virgin brand family, but we are a fully standalone bank. But being a Virgin family member gives you the license to do things slightly differently, and that's probably part of our strategy, which is to disrupt the status quo of banking. And that's proven by the fact that we don't even have 'bank' in our name, and we believe that that differentiation allows us to push the edges of what we do for our customers.

Like Microsoft, we're a purpose-driven company. Our purpose is making you happier about money. We recognize that for many of our customers, money can be a difficult thing. Finances can be tricky to manage, so we just want to make it that little bit easier for our customers in everything we do. And whether that's through how we talk to our customers, how we support them, or indeed through that CX lens, that's also blown out by three of our values. And that's one reason why we're keen to partner, and we're partnering with Microsoft. How you integrate the tools, how you pull them together, and how you then position them with your customers is absolutely the way to go ahead. So I think it's going to be quite an exciting couple of years for us all.

That was a great perspective from Virgin Money. And now I'm extremely excited to introduce Michelle Baxter from Avanade and Edwin Linda Odera from Accenture to talk about their use of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. So with that, Michelle and Edwin, why don't you guys introduce yourself quickly?

So I'm Michelle Baxter. I'm Avanade's lead for financial services. I am a white woman with shoulder-length hair, and I'm wearing a blue top, and I'm sitting in my home office.

And hi guys, I'm Edwin. I'm a Senior Managing Director at Accenture. I lead our customer practice, customer sales and service worldwide. And I'm a white male, and I've got almost no hair anymore on my head, so I decided to shave most of it off. And I'm wearing a blue T-shirt. I'm sitting in my home office, and behind me is a picture of Goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, because my wife is from India originally.

So to start off, Michelle, why don't we start with you. So we've heard a lot about Virgin Money and their use cases and their transformation with the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. What do you think about this approach and how this will impact other financial services institutions as well?

Sure, Satish, great to see you. In recent history, we've been working with banks on their digital banking experience, whether it's optimizing the mobile customer experience or optimizing contact centers. The front-office employees that interface with customers have been less of a focus. And so what we really love about the FS Cloud is it's mirroring the work we've been doing on employee experience and how that impacts customer experience. When a customer reaches out to their bank, they tend now to have more information on their phones than the employee actually has on them, so there's a missed opportunity. And so we're excited about what the FS Cloud affords in terms of the interface for the employee and how it's going to transform that employee's ability to serve. So in the case of Virgin Money, the employee will really truly be able to deliver on the Virgin brand in showcasing their empathy for the customer and making money simple and easy, and a happier experience.

Thanks, Michelle. Well, I think it's just a perfect example of what we see the most advanced banks do in the world. You know, by working on the engagement that they do with their customers, this is really how they regain trust. Because most banks, as they went through the previous digital transformation, they kind of went devoid of emotion. It was like an automated way of doing digital, and you really need to bring the emotion back into the relationship and into the interactions. And that's what creates the trust, and that's how banks are going to fight back against the neobanks and the fintechs. And we call it also the 'digital by default' way of working and what we call also the 'truly human' way of working. And it's digital by default because customers actually want to do everything digitally themselves. They want to be totally empowered to do that. And so the bank will not have like a digital set of processes on the side of the normal physical processes. No, it's all digital. However, people want to speak to the bank at some point, and they want to speak to an advisor, and they want a trusted relationship whenever they need it. And that's where we talk about every employee customer-facing, and that's all going to be in video because we want to see eye to eye. And that's why things like Teams and so on are going to be so important.

Thanks, Edwin. Michelle, so Edwin, for the next one actually, thank you by the way, that's super insightful. So for the second one actually, Edwin, we'll start with you. You know, obviously we've seen a lot of the capabilities that make up, you know, the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and of course the amazing ecosystem and partner ecosystem around it. But from your perspective, what are some of the key elements that you think, you know, would really make a difference in terms of business outcomes for financial services institutions?

Yeah, thanks, Satish. So I think what really makes this quite unique and powerful with the Microsoft stack on the cloud is, for example, the unified customer profile. So some people also call it the 'brain.' You know, it's like a set of data models where we bring together data from inside and outside the bank with contextual data, things like financial strength, household profile, key life moments, behavioral data, and so on, so that you can really understand the customer, where they're at, you know, what is important to them, where are they in their life, and how can we best serve them and what can we do for them, what advice can we give to them. And you need that in data and intelligence in order to give them great experiences. And I think that's the first thing that's really important. The second thing is once you are in those conversations, as I said before, you're either going to do it digitally because they want to have just immediate and total control, but you will also have those conversations which is either with a real human being or with a virtual agent. The virtual agent needs to have also totally personalized conversations, and the human being will typically be in video. So think of using Teams then and then having all the applications of the bank go through Teams inside the video conversation and not having to jump in and out. So I think all of these things are possible with the Microsoft stack, and that makes it so unbelievably powerful.

Yeah, I'll just add to that. You know, the Teams, the new form factor is the term that Edwin uses quite often, and I really love that term. And it's a great way to envision how you would integrate all of what your employees are using today, all of the different Microsoft tools on the desktop, and bringing all of those into Teams, and then being able to engage another colleague so that you can service a customer together. I mean, that is so powerful. And having, you know, worked with so many middle offices and trying to optimize, if you can just pull your colleague into the same conversation, it's really interesting. It's truly humanizing the digital.

I love it. Thanks, Michelle. And I mean, it's amazing to see how all of these use cases come to life, and obviously, very, very useful to kind of hear your perspective as well as you talk to customers. So the last thing actually I'll leave off is, you know, obviously the partnership that we have going. You know, one of the things I started off with is, you know, each of these industry clouds is about how we bring that high-value data, build these seated capabilities, and finally the power of the ecosystem. So, you know, thoughts about our partnership here and how we've been able to work together for the business outcomes of our joint customers? Just general thoughts and maybe any advice for folks listening to this.

Sure, I'll start. So Avanade, for those who don't know, is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture for over 20 years. So as a result, we have a unique, trusted position with Microsoft, and we also have the ability to attract talent, the top talent in the Microsoft ecosystem. So together, we've been collaborating deeply on developing the Cloud for Financial Services. And with Accenture, we have the depth and breadth to deliver at scale, as required by both large and smaller institutions.

No, thanks, Michelle. I think Accenture is really the leader in digital transformations across the world. And myself, for example, I've been working with banks all over the world on these types of things. And I think it's usually exciting because we're in the third wave of digital transformations that we need to help our clients with, and they are really existential, fundamental transformations. So the combination of Microsoft with its unique toolset on the cloud, and then Avanade with its extremely deep expertise, and then Accenture with the experience on what the future is going to look like for banks and how to get them to go there, I think it's really the unique mix that is so powerful to help banks everywhere in the world.

No, I think thank you both for sharing your experience and taking the time, and I'm really, really looking forward to continuing this great partnership.

Thanks, Satish.

Thanks, Satish.

We look forward to working with more financial institutions across the globe to help accelerate the art of the possible and help transform the workforce using the capabilities that you just saw in the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. On top of that, you know, we look forward to powering even more innovation through our extensive partner ecosystem. You can stay updated by visiting our website and the Microsoft Industry Clouds blog. Special thank you to our guests from Avanade and Accenture today, and to all of you for tuning in and taking the time. Thank you, and see you next time.