Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services Firms — How to Drive Transformation in a Financial Institution
Insurance companies, banks, hedge funds, investment companies, real estate firms — plenty of financial service organizations are highly regulated in the world. Despite the stringent compliance requirements, financial institutions face a high demand for infrastructure that:
- Combat fraud and cybercrime
- Bring new products and services to the market quickly
- Enable more personalized customer experience
- Unlock better data use
- Manage customer expectations
- Continue to meet the ever-changing compliance requirements
Microsoft brings together a lineup of cloud computing solutions across the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services Firms to address nearly all the digital transformation needs of financial services. With Microsoft Cloud, you can harness the power of:
- Microsoft Azure, a reliable enterprise-grade cloud computing platform
- Dynamic 365 to manage all your customer relationship
- GitHub Enterprise to develop software solutions for financial institutions
- Microsoft 365 to help you stay connected and get things done
- Microsoft Power Platform to analyze data, automate processes, create virtual agents, and build solutions
- Microsoft Teams to communicate with co-workers
Your financial service business can now access cloud services that meet regulatory requirements, control frameworks, meet multi-layered security compliance and improve the employee experience.
Let’s take a closer look at the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.
Combating Financial Crime
According to Javelin Strategy & Research, total identity fraud sums up billions of dollars in losses. With the increasing number of transactions and more online customers, financial institutions need to analyze and implement unique cyber solutions unique to their organizations.
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services has two tools to help financial institutions combat identity fraud, including:
- Account protection: The service protects institutions’ accounts in the digital account layer. Microsoft will help identify and protect fraud from account creation and login to prevent bot attacks, account takeover, fake accounts, and fraudulent account access.
- Purchase Protection: Microsoft uses advanced adaptive AI to protect merchant services that a financial institution offers and the merchant from online purchase fraud.
Taking care of fraud cases protects customers, safeguards an organization’s reputation, and protects them from regulatory risk.
Managing Risk, Security, and Compliance
Regional and global regulatory compliance requirements continue to change. Many financial institutions find it difficult to keep up with the ever-changing requirements and high scrutiny levels the financial service regulators apply.
What’s more, the increasing cybercrime is a huge concern. Organizations with the latest technologies are better positioned to address security and compliance challenges in the ever-evolving technological world.
To help financial services businesses manage risk, security and compliance, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services offers:
- Risk assurance and support: Microsoft has a team of engineers that support internal and external risk, audit, and compliance teams in addressing financial services regulatory compliance and privacy.
- Regulatory compliance assessment: The service helps your organization manage the compliance requirements. You’ll get help from taking inventory of data protection risks to managing the complexities of staying current with regulations and certification, implementing controls, and reporting to auditors.
- Financial crime protection: Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services uses an adaptive artificial intelligence system that consistently learns the ever-evolving fraud patterns to protect financial services companies against fraud.
- Risk Analytics: You’ll access scalable computer analytics to power modeling, insight, and regulatory reporting
Coupled with other capabilities like zero-standing access, Microsoft helps financial institutions address security and compliance challenges more effectively.
What’s more, Microsoft teamed up with Capital One to improve fraud detection accuracy through a cloud-based authorization engine.
Unifying Data for 360–Degree Customer Insights
One of the outstanding services of Microsoft Cloud for financial institutions is the Unified Customer Profile, which helps financial institutions unify data to gain client insights, get better customer understanding, and have a 360-degree view of their customers.
The service brings together financial, demographic, and behavioral data to customize customer experience and allow you to suggest the next actions.
The 360-degree view of the customer allows relationship managers to tailor customer journeys and make their experiences relevant. The tool brings together household data, upcoming events, and key life moments of your customers at your fingertips.
As a result, you can focus on the right customers and opportunities to increase success.
Integrating the Power of Partnership
Microsoft amplifies the power of its cloud services to financial institutions by partnering with third parties such as:
- Accenture
- Zafin
- Finstra
- PwC
- Avanade
- KPMG
- EY
The partners extend the capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. Your company can enjoy more integrated solutions that reduce the risk across your cloud ecosystem, allow easy marketing, and help you identify new opportunities for innovation.
For instance, Zafin’s partnership with Microsoft allows bank employees to get actionable insights by enabling the unified customer profile to deliver package recommendations and products driven by industry data.
Onboarding, Servicing, and Support
Covid pushed financial institutions to reach customers in new digital ways. Digital channels make people expect products and services to be adaptable with frictionless engagement.
The Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services allows businesses to create a differentiated customer experience with its:
- Customer onboarding: Microsoft Cloud eases customer access to self-serving tools and loan apps that streamline the loan process and improve customer experience and loyalty. More importantly, Microsoft Cloud improves the productivity of employees and the organization.
- Banking customer engagement: Microsoft Teams and Dynamic 365 allow financial institutions to offer customers personalized experiences from the data insight the company already has. The firms can then engage customers on their preferred channels, use sentiment analysis to make resolutions quickly, and manage the customer journeys across channels intelligently.
- Loan Manager: You have access to a tool that minimizes errors, improves business-to-consumer automation, allows collaboration across the front and back office, enhances customer experience, and accelerates the lending process.
Alliance Technology Partners Will Help Your St. Louis Financial Firm Leverage Microsoft Cloud
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services presents a lot of capabilities to financial firms. With Microsoft Cloud, you can:
- Utilize a platform to accelerate growth, loyalty, and profitability through personalized customer interactions and financial insights.
- Use productivity tools to improve workflow while empowering employees’ experiences and strengthening customer connections.
- Deal with financial crime since it’s easier to identify and respond to the ever-evolving cybercriminal activity while helping protect against losses.
- Stay on top of the evolving regulatory requirements and ahead of sophisticated attacks.
To leverage Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services to the fullest, you’ll need a trusted partner who’s already familiar with the platform.
At Alliance Technology Partners, we listen to understand your cloud needs and offer solutions that allow you to take advantage of Microsoft Cloud as much as possible. Contact us today to leverage pro-growth technology services for your company.
