But what if we’re making a false assumption about the trade-off between growth and efficiency? This very question was raised at a stimulating discussion I took part in at the Financial Times Global Banking Summit in London back in December. We were talking about ‘Sustaining a growth mindset: Innovating for consumer needs’, and I was joined by fellow guests Claire Calmejane, Chief Innovation Officer at Societe Generale; Rishi Khosla, CEO and Co-founder of OakNorth Bank; and Andy Ellis, who is CEO of Mettle and Head of Digital Assets at NatWest Group. The event was moderated by Liz Lumley, Deputy Director of The Banker.

How can banks continue digital transformation in a downturn?

Liz Lumley launched the session by providing helpful context. Rising interest rates and inflation are a challenge to both fintech startups and consumers as the cost-of-living crisis looms and funding is constrained. Businesses are more focused on the shorter term, while consumer purchasing decisions are in a state of flux. Nevertheless, the world’s leading lenders continue to invest in technology, data and hyper-personalisation of services. These are seen as necessary steps to retain customer loyalty and improve risk management during uncertain times.

But, we asked ourselves, is digital transformation really delivering revenue growth and profitability fast enough for shareholders? The vulnerability of many fintech businesses at the current time would suggest otherwise.

Data insights that deepen customer relationships

All the participants agreed that data was going to play a central role in the future of banking, not least by providing an accurate and complete view of the customer. In essence, rich data enables banks to make better lending decisions by anticipating changes in businesses’ financial situations. Modern analytics also provide insights that customers want to know about, which gives banks opportunities to deepen client relationships and nurture their loyalty.

Artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis and omnichannel customer engagement are also on the agenda right across the sector. The advent of these technologies has led many established banks to partner with fintechs to improve the developer experience and add to their stock of digital skills.

Integrating with fintechs for better all-round customer value

Delivering more tailored banking services and real-time customer experiences is, no doubt, an attractive proposition. However, despite the temptation to snap up smaller businesses that can deliver these, Andy Ellis of NatWest Group believes fintechs should only be considered for acquisition if they align with a bank’s strategic mission and deliver a specific capability for a defined sector. While there may be no single formula for a successful partnership, effective integration is fundamental. Fortunately, banks are getting better at preserving the agile culture of startups, where so much value lies.

Meanwhile, banking-as-a-service (BaaS) offers significantly more growth potential than traditional banking, in the view of both Andy Ellis and Claire Calmejane. Looking further ahead, Claire also saw potential in greater collaboration around open data. But progress in this area will require an international framework around data standards, secure data exchange and certification.

Advocating industry evolution, not revolution

At Microsoft, we partner with banks to help them deepen and extend their relationships with clients. A key aim is to bolster customer trust through increased responsiveness and security, while anchoring digital transformation initiatives in improved customer experience. In other words, we need ongoing work to build the foundations for innovation rather than a wholesale digital revolution.

Digital transformation is a long-term process, as are the relationships that bankers seek to foster with their clients. Microsoft’s partner network, industry specialisations and technical expertise – as demonstrated by the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services – play a key role in enabling this to happen, as well as helping businesses become more sustainable.

Looking ahead: agile banking operations that accelerate growth

One critical insight this debate revealed was the need for banks to create an efficient digital operating environment that can add products and services quickly while helping to mitigate factors like climate risk. Digital transformation can also help make lending smarter as well as faster, while growing the quantity of lending as well. As Rishi Khosla neatly put it, “The trade-off between operational efficiency and growth isn’t actually a trade-off if you’ve got a good operational environment.”

Find out more

Lead new opportunities and advancements in financial services

Scale to revenue: How to leverage fintech solutions to drive growth

4 ways to deliver a personalized banking experience

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services: Create new value with deeper customer connections

About the author

As Client Director for Microsoft, Janet is responsible for leading the strategic partnership between Microsoft and one of the UK’s leading banks. She focuses on supporting its transformation, anchored on business outcomes and drawing on Microsoft technology and partner solutions to deliver innovation and strategic change. Prior to this, Janet led Industry Strategy for Financial Services, helping customers address industry-wide challenges and innovate for the future of the industry.

Janet has a background in Corporate and Commercial Banking, having joined Microsoft in 2018 from Lloyds Banking Group and previously held roles at Barclays and NatWest. She has a personal interest in cultural transformation and has also played an active role in supporting the inclusion and diversity agenda during her career.

The post How to negotiate uncertainty in banking: aligning growth with efficiency appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In the current economic environment, banks and other financial services firms recognise the need to embrace digital transformation to get maximum value from their technology investments and do more with less. Leveraging technology also helps businesses to navigate emerging risks while driving sustainable and responsible business outcomes internally and with their customers. But how are they approaching these challenges? Last week I attended Sibos 2022 in Amsterdam, where business leaders, policy makers and technologists came together for deep dive debates and big picture outlooks on the future of the corporate banking market, including lending, trade and treasury solutions, and the related capital markets instruments. The energy and excitement on the pace of innovation was clear and I saw many themes that resonate with where we aim to lead the market in our Microsoft UK Financial Services business.  

Geopolitical tensions, the economic environment, evolving cyber threats, the race to Net Zero, the competitive landscape and ongoing reimagination of business models, modernising policy and regulation, and the continuous innovation of what is possible with people, process and digital technology are driving rapid change in the industry. When managed correctly, this change can unlock new opportunity. 

The industry is leading in many areas of technology, product and operating-model innovation, but a responsible business purpose and sustainable societal outcomes are now firmly embedded as objectives that banks are expected to deliver. “We should not seek innovation for innovation’s sake,” noted HM Queen Máxima of the Netherlands in the opening plenary. “With each new technology, we must always ask ‘What problems are we trying to solve?’” At the same time, we need to ensure any innovation is done securely and collaboratively while being additive to interoperability of data and platforms. The IMF predicts technological fragmentation can cut a country’s GDP by five percent; the benefit of collaborative industry approaches and ecosystem business models is clear. 

Through all the customer, partner, and colleague conversations at Sibos 2022, and while contributing and learning as much as we could about new ideas and technologies, the Microsoft UK Financial Services team took away four main action points: 

1.      Transform securely  

One of the key things that was highlighted by industry leaders was the importance of getting cyber security basics right to enable secure transformation. “The human firewall is the first line of defence,” said Nicolas Trimbour, Head of Fraud Prevention and Chief Data Officer for Cash Management at BNP Paribas. It’s important to educate employees and customers to recognise phishing, scams and ransomware attempts especially while the attach surface grows with increased digitisation and growing ecosystem business models. 

AI/ML solutions can work at high performance across large amounts of data to spot fraud or suspicious activity in transactions and endpoints. An industry-specific cloud solution that uses a completely private data model, while offering full data portability can help organisations as they shift from on-premise to hybrid or cloud-native architectures. At the same time, organisations can benefit from built-in security and compliance offerings that infuse healthy cyber hygiene. 

Our security experts have pulled together resources, training and more to help your teams empower and educate your employees and customers to be cyber aware. This is the right time to focus on this with October being Cyber Security Month. Check out our Cyber Security Awareness Month resources. 

2.      Build a talent and collaboration model that supports your digital ambitions   

Banks need access to the right engineering and digital skills at scale to drive industry digitisation and innovation. This is not just about attracting the talent, but re-skilling and up-skilling current resources and creating an empathetic, flexible culture. I’ve often heard it said that the number one headwind on many banks’ ability to execute on their digital transformation strategies is access to the right talent and skills. “We need to make sure we invest in our people and support them in their growth,” says Erika Irish Brown, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and Global Head of Talent at Citi.  

At Microsoft, we’re helping financial services institutions give their employees the digital skills they need. Whether that’s showing how decentralised teams can work collaboratively while working remotely, using tools to securely automate processes and workflows, or empowering pro dev, citizen dev and fusion dev teams to develop new apps, processes and reporting to make their work simpler in their domains. With 53 percent of employees more likely to prioritise health and wellbeing over work, leaders must take an empathetic approach to building a hybrid workplace. A culture that embraces flexibility and prioritises wellbeing will build a thriving organisation and drive long-term sustainable growth. This webinar with my colleague Craig Wellman goes into the importance of planning, leadership and culture in transforming financial services. 

3.      Align your ESG objectives to your business value 

The banking industry has a societal obligation to direct funding, capital, investment and lending to businesses in the real economy that will move the needle positively on ESG measures and on carbon reduction. And not only do customers, stakeholders, investors, regulators and governments expect it, but it’s also good for business. “$97 trillion needs to be invested to get to net zero. That’s a massive opportunity. It’s the most strategic and important thing we can do as an industry,” says Marisa Drew, CSO at Standard Chartered. 

The best way to start building effective ESG strategies is to tie it into your business value. Some institutions are already including their sustainability results in their financial statements. However, the industry faces challenges. A lack of global standard around climate reporting, mixed with slow manual processes and siloed data can affect how quickly you can build an effective strategy. “We don’t have perfect data, but we have actionable data,” says Gill Lofts, Global Financial Services Sustainable Finance Leader at EY. 

A unified and resilient cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can help you gain visibility across your data, drive efficiency, track and minimise your environmental impact and create sustainable value chains. We also need to drive more cross-industry collaboration.

“This is a planet-scale problem that needs planet-scale innovation and collaboration,” says Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft.

When we made our sustainability commitment in 2020, we also decided to share our learnings, results and practices, and increase our focus on supporting our customers drive their own ESG agendas. 

4.      Lead on innovation that can open new sources of value  

Recent innovations are increasingly moving from POC to production adoption across digital assets such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). 

While AI has been leveraged in organisations for a long time to reduce risk and streamline operations, organisations need to take a novel approach to AI to create new avenues of growth. “People don’t think of AI as a way to get to a new digital business,” says Sameena Shah Managing Director, AI Research Executive, and Chief Transformation Officer for Client Onboarding at JP Morgan Chase. “You need to bring people with a business mindset together with people with AI knowledge.” These groups, known as fusion teams, can help organisations deploy solutions up to two and a half times faster than siloed teams. 

“Cash as a form of payment has been declining, but cash in circulation is growing. We have also seen over the past 10 years the rise of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and CBDCs,” says Marion Laboure, Senior Economist at Deutsche Bank. 

One thing digitisation can do is help with financial inclusion. The 1.7 billion people who don’t have access to financial services can potentially use CBDC to start using financial services without a bank account. 

NFTs are currently used to tie ownership to a digital asset. However, as they evolve, it could allow the construction of the end asset to be more sophisticated. “That’s when it becomes more interesting to us in Finance. We can look at a new type of securitised asset, a new type of yield profile that may or may not be totally uncorrelated with traditional markets and assets,” said John Egan, CEO of L’Atelier at BNP Paribas. In fact, the US Securities and Exchange Commission are already looking into NFTs as a security. With no intermediaries, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is less complex and more agile than the traditional central counterparty model. However, it is probably riskier. Experts suggest a hybrid model for DeFi, with the right regulatory guiderails to manage AML, fraud, conduct risk, and cybercrime. 

“Web3 and blockchain technologies are unique because they create a different, efficient way of executing processes. They can be best served to decrease complexity, increase security and transparency,” says Willayna Banner, Microsoft’s Head of Web3/Blockchain in Financial Services. Learn how organisations are using blockchain to transform functions such as trade finance and commercial specialty insurance. 

Collaborating for industry growth and responsible innovation 

As we shared these thoughts and ideas on the future of banking at Sibos 2022, a recurring theme was industry collaboration across the widest perimeter of stakeholders. To drive growth while being resilient, secure and compliant in our changing industry, our key priorities must be removing friction, increasing interoperability and improving the service experience for our customers, empowering our teams, and driving inclusive, sustainable innovation. 

Find out more 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service Webinar for Financial Services: The changing role of the Digital Contact Centre

Rethinking the Customer Experience | Microsoft

About the author 

Niall is responsible for defining and leading Microsoft’s strategy for Financial Services in the UK. His focus is on helping Microsoft’s customers’ address industry-wide challenges, adapt to new regulatory frameworks and achieve business transformation through the adoption of Microsoft technology and partner solutions. He works to deliver on the cost, growth, risk and regulatory agenda front-to-back through the enterprise. 

Niall has experience in consulting, partner ecosystems, and large programme delivery in Financial Services. Niall has focused on operating model transformation and technology solutions for business challenges in Banking and Capital Markets, often in the regulatory change context. He has worked mostly with international banking groups and has lived in Hong Kong and London. 

The post The future of banking: How to stay innovative, collaborative and secure appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Today their role hasn’t necessarily changed. However, the value organisations place on them certainly has. The focus is shifting from fitting customers around business processes to reshaping contact centres around customers’ needs.

For years, the role of contact centres was limited – often confined by traditional 9-5 working hours. It was predominantly aimed at driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

This was reflected by the way companies measured their success. They had KPIs ranging from targets for call volumes to queue times and abandonment rates. These inward-focussed efficiency metrics have, however, consistently failed to put the customer at the centre of the service.

In today’s increasingly digitalised environment, this is no longer sustainable. Nothing is more valuable than customer experience and customer outcome. Organisations are fast adapting to the idea that great customer experiences convert into customer loyalty and new customers. People increasingly sharing their positive and negative experiences online. As a result, financial institutions can no longer afford to underestimate their services.

Contact centres are transforming. From unempathetic, 9-5 services reliant on a standard agent script, to becoming a customer experience centre. They don’t just focus on a service but the total customer experience across an organisation.

This presents a new opportunity for financial services companies to become fully connected organisations driven by technology. Embrace solutions that connect and unify all their channels – from digital to physical and mobile. As a result, they can create seamless, connected customer experiences that distinguish them from their competitors.

Understanding the needs of financial services customers

To better equip contact centres to service customers, we first need to look at how the needs of these customers have changed over time.

The past few years have seen the customer landscape evolve and diversify significantly. Alongside more traditional customers, organisations are increasingly welcoming a new generation of tech-savvy, socially connected customers. They come with a fresh new range of expectations.

Empathy, passion and hyper-personal connections are key drivers behind their demands. They centre around being understood and supported throughout their customer journey. Failure to do so can have catastrophic effects for organisations. Not only will it risk customers leaving their service but also expressing their frustration online.

This means one thing:

The more you know your customer, the more you can tailor your service to them.

A customer who’s been with your organisation for decades will be likely to seek support through traditional landlines or your website. On the other hand, the younger, digitally savvy customers will want mobile and self-service options, pursuing a more digital experience.

So how can organisations make sure that all these needs and preferences are satisfied? Put simply, the more diversified the audience, the more diversified the services.

Breaking down silos in contact centres

To really drive customer satisfaction across your evolving customer base, you need to invest in omnichannel engagement. Encompassing anything from social media to instant messaging, webchats and physical customer support, customers choose their channel of preference.

But this hasn’t always been the case for organisations in the financial services industry. Organisations may have invested in technologies to support a growing number and type of customer-facing channels. However, these are often used in silos and operated by different vendors.

This leaves customer data confined. Additionally, it prevents agents from surfacing customers across multiple systems. Most importantly, it prevents organisations from leveraging customer insights and using them to better orchestrate the customer journey.

Organisations who adapt and unify these siloes will be more likely to succeed at improving the customer journey. Doing so will empower employees to be more collaborative and productive. It will also reduce time to serve customers and provide an overall higher quality of service.

But it’s not enough to change the internal ways of working. Organisations must improve the way they build relationships with their customers. Looking ahead, they need to improve their ability to capture interactions in the moments that matter. They must continuously adapt and improve using this new-found knowledge.

To do this, they need an infrastructure and technology foundation. One that can empower them to capture these moments, understand their context and orchestrate the best, most optimal route across any function. All to deliver fast, impactful and personalised services that convert prospects into long-lasting advocates.

The rise in automated self-service technology

In a world that increasingly relies on digital innovation and newly found tech capabilities, automation can play a key role in improving customer services and contact centres.

Until recently, these have had virtually no front-door filter standing between customers and operators. Self-service has only just started to become a reality, leaving agents to deal with more complex cases.

This is where automation comes in. As data-based insights and capabilities become the norm, organisations have the opportunity to identify the simpler customer queries. They can then direct them to self-service areas, virtual assistants and AI-powered services.

Conversational virtual assistants are a powerful tool. Especially when it comes to harnessing data to gain insights on the customer. This data can be used to understand customer demands, their purchase history and previous complaints and other crucial information that can help them address their query entirely autonomously.

If the customer wants to transfer to a human, all that data can be carried across. Using AI, potential knowledge articles and recommendations, agents can successfully solve a customer’s request.

AI can also assist with more complex tasks such as pre-authenticating customers before speaking to an agent. This time-saving feature benefits both the customer experience and a contact centre’s inward metrics. With the addition of voice-biometric technology, a virtual agent could also help detect and prevent fraud by comparing a customer’s voice against their customer profile. A more cost-effective solution to training agents on fraud prevention and extra reassurance to customers that their money is secure.

These kinds of innovations aren’t there to make calling a contact centre redundant. There will always be a need to speak to agents to help manage banking relationships or advise on future monetary decisions. But for simpler, everyday tasks, financial organisations can empower customers to self-service rather than waiting to speak to an adviser.

Challenger banks have been particularly good at pushing innovations in this way and raising the customer service bar. Many of them are truly revolutionising retail banking by reducing typical applications processes from a week to minutes. By promoting a digitally-native experience, more traditional banks are forced to reconsider their own customer experience.

Keeping customer data secure in the cloud

Data breaches happen far too frequently today. And as financial institutions can hold an entire customer’s wealth – from mortgages to loans to bank balances – there’s an enormous responsibility to ensure that data is kept safe and secure.

This presents an immediate challenge to spend millions innovating on an existing IT infrastructure. This may require a huge amount of capital investment and resources to maintain. We’re seeing many leading insurance companies and banks choosing to migrate their contact centre operations from on-premise servers to the cloud.

If you consider Azure for example, Microsoft has already spent billions creating a secure cloud solution and helped protect leading organisations from cyber-attacks, fraud and Denial-of-Service on an intraday basis. This reassurance makes migrating to the cloud not just a business decision for better data security, but also for greater cost efficiency by eliminating the many overheads that physical servers require.

The cloud also offers advantages when it comes to complying to financial regulations such as how organisations handle data, offer services and prevent financial crime. By working with a trusted cloud provider like Microsoft, a lot of this responsibly can be shared and evidence can be provided to show that data is being kept securely and systems are operating within regulations.

An all-in-one solution for financial services contact centres

Financial organisations are changing. Their reputation and global presence is increasingly tied to customer experience, online reviews and the quality of their services. As a result, they must reimagine their services with a new, more demanding and diversified customer base in mind.

At the same time, switching banks or insurers has never been simpler. Therefore, it crucial for organisations to innovate their contact centre and make the end-to-end experience as efficient and helpful as possible.

The key is to not consider every channel as a separate challenge. A 2021 Forrester report commissioned by Microsoft, Boost Your CX With A Better Integrated Contact Center, CRM, And Collaboration Systems, found that 74 percent of contact centre agents in organisations typically use four or more applications to service customers. This gives a disconnected experience for agents. But by implementing an all-in-one contact centre solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, financial organisations can manage their operation through a single platform. From initial customer contact to automated self-service with AI virtual assistants, to agent-guided case management and back office collaboration with Microsoft Teams.

This allows live agents to interact with customers on any channel. They have a complete overview of all previous interactions to give a frictionless and effective customer journey. It also helps to free up their time. So they can focus on the most complex and sensitive requests that virtual assistants aren’t equipped to handle.

Find out more

Envisioning the Future of Customer Experience

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service.

The post How data and AI will transform contact centres for financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

With less of a product-centric approach, these banks are building innovative cloud-native platforms from the ground up in as little as 12 months. They offer customers an analytical view of their spending habits alongside useful banking features to empower more control of their money.

But even in this space, digital banks are only just scratching the surface. What happens when you start to really understand the behaviour of a customer or business on a transactional level? You open up a wealth of financial and non-financial services that can help improve a customer’s way of life.

Adapting a traditional banking model for the digital consumer

Banks have the ambition to change. However, many are still tied down with high IT operation costs from supporting legacy systems. As a result, we’re increasingly seeing banks across the world looking to ‘create capacity’ and reduce these overheads.

If they can find ways to increase their innovation budgets, traditional banks have a few ways to modernise and keep up with their digital competitors. Right now, we’re seeing three key models being used in this space:

• Leveraging an existing legacy system by adding an API layer to enhance a customer’s digital experience. This allows the bank to integrate with other open banking sources. They can better analyse transactional data to offer more customer-centric features. A faster way to keep pace with other digital banks but ultimately still limited by the legacy.

• Creating a digital sub-brand in the retail space can appeal to anyone looking for a richer banking experience. At the same time, they don’t lose the consumers who still prefer using a trusted provider as their primary account. This does raise an immediate challenge of maintaining two cores – an expensive legacy system with little insight into customer spending habits, and a paralleled digital platform with more discretionary spending but only a small amount of data to target customers with.

• This leads to a third model that we are seeing more and more. Banks building a modular cloud platform to replace their core and take full advantage of the digital space. This approach has more complexity. It requires the new cloud-native system to still support a breath of banking products to maintain the bank’s existing customer base. For a business transformation on this scale, banks should consider simplifying or decommissioning certain financial products in place of new data-driven services. But the outcome will always be a more agile business that has something to offer customers and businesses of all shapes and sizes.

The potential of data-driven and AI banking solutions

By shifting from a product-centric model to one that prioritises customer experience, both traditional and digital banks have more opportunities to support customers in achieving their own personal or business goals.

The key to this is analysing behavioural data and spotting patterns that can prompt a related recommendation or service. In the financial space this could be predicting when a customer may be late paying their bill and reaching out with a solution to extend their credit. Or for non-financial services, like combining a customer’s eco-friendly transactions with smart fitness data to show a holistic view of their carbon footprint.

A second area to consider is how banks could use their partner ecosystem or existing customers to make personalised recommendations for businesses.

Take banks that work with farmers and other agriculture-type services for example. Every year around harvest time they know farmers will request a loan to lease equipment. They use AI to discover the organisations within their customer base that lease farming machinery. Why not approach the farmer with a pre-approved loan when harvest time rolls around and details to connect the two businesses? This turns the whole experience from a product with a transaction rate to a value-added service supplied unexpectedly by the bank.

The goal is to make customers part of the bank’s ecosystem. If the bank can understand what the customer’s products and services are, they can matchmake or connect the customer with opportunities to grow their business. Plus, it ultimately helps the bank grow its own revenue and profit.

Creating a cross-industry banking ecosystem

Transaction data can offer a degree of insight into when, how much and who customers spend money with. But without the SKU level data, banks still don’t know anything about the purchases themselves. Retailers on the other hand are the complete opposite – knowing what they’ve sold but little idea who they’ve sold to.

If banks can create a proposition to bridge that gap. They then can use AI to identify patterns in a customer’s buying behaviour. As a result, they can make personalised recommendations to use partners in the bank’s ecosystem. From special offers on travel insurance for people who fly regularly to recommending eco-friendly brands to sustainable shoppers.

When you consider also the range of customers a bank can have – SMBs, corporate, retailers, manufacturers – this proposition can also go a step further. Banks can connect customer-to-customer and improve the value chain for everyone involved.

Say a farmer produces milk and distributes it to a manufacturer of yogurt and cheese. This is then moved on to a wholesaler and finally the end retailer. If each business was a customer of the bank, they could help remove data silos and interconnect them. This will benefit the entire value chain.

If milk demand rises, the bank can link the manufacturer to more milk farmers in its ecosystem. Or if the farmer has a surplus of milk this month, the bank can recommend other manufacturers to do business with. A smart decision to help accelerate the business’s growth. It also turns the bank from a financial service into an industry partner.

Envisioning the bank of the future

Whatever digital banking model a bank chooses to invest in, it’s essential they first define their new customer journey. This will determine what data, AI and advanced analytics the bank needs to achieve this goal. They can then start looking into partners that can deliver those capabilities.

This is where Microsoft’s ISV partner ecosystem helps digital banks fast track their implementations. Using Azure as a modular platform, new solutions and services can be plugged in as required in ways a more monolithic core banking platform could never do.

It’s important to remember that the success of digital banks isn’t solely down to the fintech or platforms they are using. It is the change of mindset that traditional banks need to embrace – shifting from product-centric thinking to experience-centric action. With that in mind, here’s some things to consider:

1. With more and more banks moving into the digital space, make sure you are clear on your digital proposition. What customer needs will it address and how can you achieve this better than other providers?
2. When you’re ready to progress, keep in mind that it’s not just the technology that you need to have in place. Your business also needs to rethink how it operates and be willing to make changes to move the organisation forward.

Find out more

Get insight to the latest modernisation strategies in the Digital Banking Playbook 2021

Grow your business with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

About the author

Steve is a senior industry architect at Microsoft Industry Solutions, working for the worldwide team. He leads digital transformation for Microsoft’s largest and most strategic Financial Services customers across the globe. He specialises in core banking, payments, and the design and delivery of neo-banks on the Microsoft Cloud platform. Steve has over 25 years of experience in various leadership, architectural and advisory roles. As a result, he has been instrumental in leading banks on their journey to the cloud.

The post The rise of digital banking: where do we go from here? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

When we talk about app innovation, we’re talking about exploring new ways to become more agile as organisations. I work with a lot of customers in the financial services industry and they all have one thing in common: they want to be more agile.

However being ‘more agile’ means different things to different financial service businesses depending on their starting point. Let’s break down the goal of app innovation into three horizons.

Modernising legacy systems to unlock and drive value

The first horizon is to have app innovation support legacy modernisation. “How can the cloud better optimise and enable the stuff we already run?” The focus is on efficiency: making things easier to manage, less onerous to upgrade, more sustainable. At the other end of the scale, the third horizon is all about the net new. How can app innovation empower us to bring new or better products to market? Or radically transform the way we bring products to market, expand our offerings to new markets, or bring new services online?

The shades of grey in between is the second horizon. The focus here is on things like transformation automation, or even simply moving applications ‘up the stack’. This means moving from manually managing Virtual Machines to leveraging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that can help streamline operations. Because innovation doesn’t have to be radical. Sometimes the most effective innovations are the incremental gains where we pay down some of the technical debt we’re carrying, slowly creating more agility, power, and momentum, ultimately allowing our teams to do more with less.

Here I want to unpack a few of these themes and shine a light on the great potential that app innovation in particular offers financial services organisations.

The value of business process automation

Technical debt is an analogy I often use to explain the challenge many financial services organisations face. Just like financial debt, the bigger the amount of technical debt you carry, the more interest you have to pay on it just to stand still.

But if I can pay down some of my technical debt, I can reinvest that interest in accelerating part of my organisation’s momentum in the right direction. For financial services organisations, this second horizon transformation can be extremely powerful.

Say you’re running an application that requires hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) to function. Somebody’s patching those VMs, manually making sure that the middleware on them is up and running. They ensure the connectivity, disaster recovery, the backup plans are all in place. Additionally, they build and maintain the data and applications that deliver business value and run them on those VMs.

If you can move some of that to a platform or service offering that manages that for you such as Azure, you can automate that process and reduce the manual labour. This is what we refer to as ‘moving up the stack’. Patching and updating becomes something you do with configuration. It may seem obvious to developers and development leads, but often the infrastructure status quo hampers the ability to see that bigger picture and build the business case for the move to PaaS. So it’s all about efficiency in the total cost to operate. How do you automate more of what you do, so you can move customers up the stack, free the teams that build these systems to spend less time manually overcoming hurdles and spend more time delivering business value?

Embrace an agile developer culture

A scenario that happens a lot in financial services is developer teams want to experiment with a new service. But they often spend more time filling out paperwork to request the infrastructure they need than it would actually take to do the development. However, by automating the secure creation and management of those environments, we can build agile dev teams.

Within policy controlled environments, we can create sandboxes where within minutes developers can experiment to see if the idea has legs and they want to scale, or if it’s not what they thought it was. Scale fast or fail fast, as they say.

Having the ability to be agile, to experiment, to test and learn, to play with new services quickly in an automated way, means you can genuinely innovate faster. And that is my goal: to unlock our customers’ ability to execute on their innovation and vision.

Develop a culture of innovation and change

When it comes to introducing new technologies, one of the pieces of the puzzle that is often overlooked is process. How do we create a culture of sharing best practise, encouraging reuse – a culture of inner sourcing? How do we encourage the collaboration environments in which developers can share the technology they build within their organisation? How do we promote reusability inside an organisation?

That’s where development collaboration platforms like GitHub become really powerful. It’s not just source control. It helps develop collaboration and empowers developers to reuse assets. You can do that by bringing the open-source approach into your own business and fostering that culture. It’s about saying: within my business, any business unit can take what I’ve built and reuse it or extend it or contribute back to it, but it’s not a public thing.

But a hurdle organisations need to overcome is feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of a cultural transformation. I often hear: “It’s such a big problem. I don’t know where to start. Huge cultural transformation. We’ll never get there.”

The key is to break the process down into bite sized chunks. Start with one key area of the business for one product, a set of workloads or a service line. Demonstrate the value of transformation in a smaller project. You’ll learn a load of lessons on the way about where the organisation is in its readiness to embrace that type of transformation. This may be politics, technology or real capabilities.

From there, you can grow. It typically takes a senior leader who believes in the project and wants to make it happen, as well as an engineering function that’s willing to embrace different ways of working and take onboard learnings from outside the business. But it also takes business units who want to be part of that process. If you’re a business unit and you want to just throw requirements over the fence and hope that somebody deals with them, that’s not going to work. That’s where the cultural change really needs to come together.

AI and innovation to drive customer expereinces

One of the main challenges facing the financial services industry at the moment is changing customer expectations. As consumers, we get instant gratification with the expectation for immediate delivery, instant access to data and service on-demand.  As a result, we have that same expectation of our business interactions. We assume that every business should operate the same way. However in reality, the systems and processes in financial services aren’t geared for that.

At the same time, there is a challenge from FinTech start-ups nipping at the heels of established industry players. They don’t have the same technical debt to carry and are more agile. As a result, they can come at the industry from a very different angle, building services that feel much more like our consumer interactions, are much more data-led, where the experience is the same regardless of interaction – online, via apps, or an intermediary.

Both of these factors create a compelling need to be able to become a differentiator. To move faster, to innovate, to release new products, to meet the customer’s expectation. In the modern world of finance, we need that transformation to flow front to back, from the button I press on my phone through to that being recorded in a ledger somewhere. For insurance companies, it’s more about how we can use data and AI algorithms to calculate risk. If I can automate that process rather than it requiring human intervention, I can write more policies, I can take on more risk as an insurer, or win more business as a broker because I can make the decision much quicker.

These are the business outcomes. And in order to achieve them, we must be comfortable with building modern applications, and doing that rapidly, taking them to market quickly. Just like a FinTech start-up would.

But doing that means being agile, which we can’t be if we’re carrying lots of technical debt. We can’t do that if we’ve got lots of legacy to deal with. That’s where Microsoft can support our financial service partners. To reduce their technical debt. To modernise their processes and infrastructures. To unlock a future of agility, experimentation, and innovation.

Find out more

Imagine digital innovation that delivers a seamless experience with real impact

Drive business performance by empowering developers to innovate

Discover how to scale DevOps practices throughout your organisation

Resources to empower your developer team

Using Azure Pipelines to increase creativity and reduce costs

Introduction to Azure DevOps

About the author

Matt heads up the Digital Transformation & App Innovation team within Microsoft UK’s Solutions business. He leads a team of innovation and development centred Specialists focused on helping customers understand, plan for, and adopt some of the most cutting-edge services in Microsoft’s arsenal – from GitHub for developer productivity, managed container offerings such as Azure Kubernetes Services, PaaS and serverless with Azure Functions and Logic Apps, Integration Services, Event Grid, and more, through to engaging wider stakeholder audiences in the development process through adoption of low-code development with Power Apps.  

Matt’s background is firmly in engineering for innovation. With a master’s in computing and over two decades of experience from hands on ecommerce, payment and billing systems development in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s, to leading a global consulting team designing and rolling out bespoke Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting products for FTSE 10 integrated energy companies, and on to launching an IoT Pet Tracking start-up, founding, building, and selling a Digital Transformation consultancy before joining Microsoft in 2018. 

Consistent to all of Matt’s endeavors is an understanding of what is possible, how it aligns to solving real world business challenges, and always starting with the “Why”.  

The post How to drive innovation and agility in financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Fintechs are often cloud-native by design and therefore have agile architectures, making it easier for financial services organisations to leverage them and respond to changing market opportunities. In this blog, we’re going to uncover some of the top opportunities to drive innovation in the sector. Additionally, we’ll share practical ways to start building your future focussed strategy.

1.      Create differentiated customer experiences with data and AI

One of the things that we’ve seen in the last year is a rise in demand for digital experiences. Customers want – and expect – great experience no matter the platform they’re on. It is also key to long term growth and customer loyalty.

One Microsoft partner helping financial service providers to better connect with their small business customers is Codat, who provides seamless integration to the leading financial data platforms, so banks can expedite the loan application process. Codat are innovating with organisations like Virgin Money, Atom Bank. They are expanding through partnerships with Visa, Plaid and Dynamics 365. SMEs will play a key role in our economic recovery moving forward. For many, their survival will depend on their ability to access funding.

At Microsoft we believe that client experience can be fundamentally transformed through the power of AI, a belief shared by our fintech fintech partner Abaka. Using a financial intelligence platform, Abaka helps provide customers with the right products, at the right time, through the right channels. It’s all based around hyper-personalised nudges and next best action recommendations. As a result, engagement, retention, product conversion and upsell has increased. Institutions such as HSBC, Prudential, OTP Bank, NatWest, St James’s Place are all leveraging Abaka technology to deliver services to their retail and wealth customers.

2.      Modernise core banking systems through cloud-native technology

Many institutions are modernising core banking systems through partnerships with new cloud-based core providers. This shift is due to the public cloud’s enhanced agility and ability to handle a high volume of transactions. At the same time, a modern core helps drive more personalised experiences through enabling real time access to wide data sources.

Whether launching greenfield banks or modernising existing cores – there are some excellent UK fintech partners that are well-positioned to help the industry innovate. Two UK Microsoft partners driving this trend worldwide are Thought Machine and 10x Future Technologies. These both scale rapidly to meet the increased demand for cloud-native cores. Also, they help organisations shift away from the cycle of expensive legacy technology. According to McKinsey, 65 percent of banks are exploring next generation platforms like these.

3.      Deliver customer lifetime value with Banking as a Service

The opportunity isn’t just limited to the financial services industry. In fact, any organisation can start to build financial products into their offerings through embedded finance. Partnerships with Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers are key in enabling this. They have the platforms and regulatory frameworks to enable non-bank customers to provide services such as bank accounts, payments, credit cards and lending. ClearBank for example, are using their extensive experience to offer access to their BaaS platform, and help organisations like Tide to increase their range of UK SME offerings.

Additionally, there are fintechs like Omnio who are helping financial and non-financial institutions, such as retailers and airlines, to transform the way consumers receive financial services. Omnio has helped the likes of EasyJet and An Post to embed white label financial products into their digital offering, helping to position these brands in the financial lives of their customers.

4.      Manage risk and build customer trust with data and automation

The use of Open Banking rose in 2020, with  4.3 million payments made using the system, compared to 230,000 in 2019. Open Banking is key to fintech innovation as it allows third parties to access consumer financial data to develop new, customer-centric services. It also allows banks to build an ecosystem of digital offerings. Many UK fintechs focus on Open Banking and automation to help keep customers safe and are choosing to host on Microsoft Azure.

One example is Experian’s Open Data Platform, which gives organisations instant access to a customer’s financial information by using Experian’s comprehensive set of consumer and business credit services. Organisations can get a better picture of affordability, credit worthiness and financial wellbeing that is critical in protecting a financial institution and its customers. As well as managing risk, the platform also serves to build a more trusting relationship with consumers.

Trade finance for large corporate and financial institutions is another example of where risk can be managed through innovative fintech. Demica have a powerful, intuitive platform that interfaces with corporate ERP systems to enable automated financing and powers the working capital programmes of the world’s leading financial institutions. The platform currently enables the financing of over $18 billion of assets worldwide and helps to manage financial stress and liquidity more effectively for its users.

Finally, substantial risk can also stem from the manual handling of data. This is another key reason why automation is on the rise, enabling financial firms to better tackle hidden operational risk and perform more accurate reconciliation. Xceptor is one such specialist in this sector, providing an no-code platform to deliver end-to-end automation of complex processes. Xceptor’s automation customers include Citi, HSBC and US Bank.

Find out more

Microsoft AppSource – destination for business apps

Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Let’s shape the future of intelligent banking and capital markets together

Read more about intelligent banking 

About the author

George works in the Microsoft UK partnership team, building strategic relationships with industry leading software vendors across Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets. He is the fintech guy and helps shine a light on the great impact the B2B Fintech ecosystem has on the Microsoft business and with customers. He also has a keen interest in technology-led sustainability, supporting the UK partner community on the carbon benefits of cloud computing.

The post How UK fintechs can help build innovation and personalised customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Digital adoption has leapt forward two years in just a few months, both by choice and necessity. Bankers estimate there has been a sixfold surge in cashless transactions in 2020. Traditional lenders – with a cautious eye on fast-growing fintech startups – are each year investing tens of billions in innovation and upgrading their legacy systems. How can they ensure this money is wisely spent? And where and when will the sector start to see material return on investment (ROI)?

Innovation in digitalisation and ROI

“There is no doubt COVID-19 has really changed and accelerated the pace of digital transformation,” said Craig Wellman, Head of UK Financial Services Sales at Microsoft during a joint webinar with the Financial Times on the topic.

With the advent of cloud computing, he added that executives had already completely overhauled their ambitions. Their priorities are no longer only focused on cost cuts, but now also on AI-driven personalisation, cybersecurity and creating a faster, less cumbersome customer experience.

The normal ROI measures of customer loyalty, revenue generation and cost savings still remain relevant. Banks also have to invest to match to the high standards set by new consumer tech champions such as Amazon or Netflix.

“There’s no question customer expectations have changed a lot… their experience needs to feel personal, relevant and seamless,” said Josh Bottomley, Head of Digital at HSBC, Europe’s largest bank.

“The ‘computer says no’ example still sticks with people,” he added. “In banking there are still too many questions we can filter out from forms… We need to make it easier to log on to a single app with a personalised home screen.”

Digitalisation for competitive advantage

Banks are also challenged by easy-to-use fintech upstarts that are attracting droves of loyal users, especially among the young.

Lavanya Menon, Head of Digital Transformation Risk at Lloyds Bank, said that since her bank started its digitisation programme five years ago “we have made the gap between a fintech and a legacy bank smaller by trying to focus our investment on the ‘Amazonification’ of banking,” she said. “What has taken off is friction-free finance… that timeline is ever changing and never ending.”

Bottomley said another less obvious, but potentially more important, measure of return on digital investment was “future cost avoidance.”

He used the example of COVID-19. HSBC was able to participate in multiple government emergency financing schemes around the world in less than 48 hours by using secure, digital customer forms. This would have been impossible had the lender not migrated much of its data and processing to the cloud in recent years.

Long-term transformation and AI

There must also be a balance between major long-term transformation and “quick wins” said Wellman. The latter “generate excitement among customers and at the board level with an easily visible and speedy ROI.”

“You can’t just have a succession of unfinished five-year projects… When you get to the point previously thought to be a panacea, the market will have evolved again,” he added. For example, these days Microsoft updates Windows every few weeks rather than every few years.

The panel also discussed the future of personalised, AI-driven, automated service and selling. Is this a panacea for pressurised earnings in consumer banking – sitting as they do on vast pools of data for tens of millions of customers – or is it perilous and risks exacerbating inequality or discrimination in finance?

Menon said that while Lloyds had made “huge strides” in personalised cross-selling and single-sign on authentication, “as a risk professional what worries me is when we get into the field of AI and robotics, especially if we rely solely on algorithms” because there are always concerns about biased or incomplete data.

“I am pleased regulators haven’t made progress in the space yet,” she added. “It gives us a needed pause before we wade into a field we don’t really understand.”

Wellman concurred, saying “implementing AI processes on top of inaccurate or unmanageable data feeds risks simply speeding up the process of bad decision making…”

However, on a more simplistic level, AI can reduce frustrating and time consuming tasks like form filling, with intelligent systems prepopulating data across various platforms, he added. This addresses “the thing all consumers want first: simplicity and ease of use”. It also means employees can be freed up for those more complex tasks and providing personalised service.

While regulators haven’t reached the field of AI, banking organisations can take their own steps to responsible and ethical AI to reduce the risk of bias, security, and more. Microsoft have shared their responsible AI principles.

The future of digitalisation

The best way to get started is with a strong business strategy that includes utilising data to differentiate your value proposition, re-evaluate the potential of existing or new revenue streams and establishing trustworthiness in both customers and employees.

Organisations who focus on those key factors also heavily emphasise customer insights and intelligence, utilising technology to drive personalised experiences, using data to respond quickly to external and internal changes. They also find new ways to innovate and streamline operations, leveraging employees to be more agile and drive new opportunities.

Find out more

Watch the on-demand webinar: The digital transformation timeline with Microsoft and The Financial Times

Read the blog: 3 ways the banking sector can innovate in the new normal

Download the report: Boosting the innovation of banking business models

About the authors

Stephen Morris is the Financial Times’ (FT) Banking Editor.  He was formerly the FT’s European Banking Correspondent. He joined the FT in August 2018 after eight years with Bloomberg News, where he was UK Banks Reporter. Prior to that, he covered politics for the Independent.

Craig Wellman leads Microsoft’s financial services organisation in the UK with a singular ambition – to enable financial services institutions to harness the power of technology to accelerate transformation and reimagine what’s possible.

As one of the UK’s largest sectors, the financial services industry impacts our lives daily. With rapid digitisation underway, from front office to back, financial institutions have a once in a generation opportunity to combine existing and new industry capabilities to deliver a more seamless, secure and personalised experience.

Craig spends his time providing trusted consultancy to senior leaders of financial institutions across the UK. By showcasing the art of the possible, Craig helps leaders devise strategies that better serve customers, enhance the productivity and wellbeing of employees, and future-proof their businesses, whilst meeting the requirements of an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.

With more than 25 years’ experience, Craig has held senior leadership roles across several market-leading organisations, including Legal & General, Vodafone and Virgin Group. He enjoys spending time with his wife and three children at their home in West Berkshire and is a keen runner and football fan.

The post Why the digitalisation of retail banking matters appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

At Microsoft, I’m constantly reminded of how advances in security technology can enable productivity and collaboration. How it can actually create and improve inclusive user experiences. We do this by adapting security policies and processes to reflect how users and consumers are utilising and engaging technology, and new ways of working, on an evolving basis.

What does this way of thinking mean? It means that a people-first approach is essential when considering the best approach to cyber resilience and business continuity. Especially as you navigate the next steps, and prepare you for the unexpected. It will also support your employees to do their best, no matter where they are, or what their circumstances.

Here are four shifts that will support your organisation on the journey to resilience and inclusivity.

1. Drive the future of security with digital empathy

The most successful organisations who empower their people to achieve more by being productive from anywhere, are the ones who are empathetic to the end-user experience. Sometimes this can be a friendly voice over a Teams call, or assisting them as they adapt to new ways of working.

Digital empathy also stretches to making digital solutions more inclusive. This means having tools and policies that adapt to people’s ever-changing circumstances.

Bring Your Own Device Policies

With more users becoming remote and working flexibly, it can be inconvenient for users to carry multiple corporate and personal devices. Its great to see financial institutions rethinking their approach to Bring Your Own Device (BOYD) policies. This offers flexibility and choice for users. It can also speed up the onboarding process and reduce costs in sourcing and maintaining devices.

Of course, this doesn’t come without risk. To protect users’ privacy and control access to corporate services and data, the devices need to be both ‘trusted and healthy’. By utilising a management tool like Intune to prevent unauthorised access and compromise you can:

• Manage at the device level. Mobile Device Management (MDM) lets you enroll devices for management. This includes all data that lives on the device. You have full control to ensure the device is compliant and can manage settings, certificates, and profiles.
• Another approach is Mobile Application Management (MAM). This works well for BYOD scenario. With MAM you can publish, push, configure, secure, monitor, and update mobile apps for your remote workers. This provides application-level controls and compliance, while maintaining the familiar user experience for end users.

2.      A Zero Trust security approach

As employees started working remotely en masse, the traditional type of ring-fenced security had its disadvantages. It often struggled to meet the need of a hybrid workforce, working from different locations, and from multiple devices. Therefore adopting a Zero Trust approach to business continuity and security became an imperative.

The key principles of Zero Trust are quite straightforward:

• Never trust
• Always verify
• Assume compromise

In a Zero Trust model, access by users and devices – both inside and outside the corporate network – is granted based on an evaluation of the risk associated with each request. The same security checks are applied to all users, devices, applications and data every time.

To start with Zero Trust, it’s important to realign around identity. This can benefit employees, as it makes it easier for them to use single sign-on or access data across multiple devices. For example, multi-factor authentication prevents 99 percent of credential theft and other intelligent authentication methods can make accessing apps easier and more secure than just using traditional passwords. This also helps create robust BYOD strategies that work in unison to enable users to be both secure, and productive.

Of course, it’s important to pair a Zero Trust strategy with advanced threat protection and information protection. This helps to detect and prevent lateral movement, and data loss, no matter where it resides.

3.      A people-led focus to a secure control environment

What normally works on-premise does not easily transfer to a cloud or hybrid operating model. particularly when accessing critical services and data from multiple sources.

For example, how is your Virtual Private Network (VPN) set up? It can often force all your network traffic through on-premises data centres, slowing down services and making it hard for employees to work. This may cause frustration. It can cause employees to look for workarounds, potentially bypassing safeguarding controls and policies, and downloading apps from the internet.

This scenario can be fixed by initiating split-tunnelling. This allows trusted cloud services like Microsoft 365 to be accessed straight over the internet. Your VPN can then be used to access critical apps and data that reside in your Data Centre, reducing the load.

In addition, a Cloud Access Security Blocker (CASB) gives you rich visibility over your shadow IT. It provides a centralised approach to monitor and protect access to data, on cloud based apps. As an example, we implemented Cloud App Security for more than 150,000 employees globally. Apps that don’t meet our stringent security standards are blocked. Popular and trusted apps are onboarded to our Azure Active Directory, making it easier for employees to access what they need securely.

4.      Providing resilient education to improve security

As cybersecurity matures, so do adversaries. They are adept at changing techniques and tactics, and at exploiting local or global events to lure victims via phishing campaigns. Using cloud-based security means you can take advantage of intelligent threat protection and analytics. For example, we collect and analyse over 8 trillion telemetry signals daily from a diverse set of products, services, and feeds around the globe. At the same time, you need to ensure your employees have the knowledge to protect themselves to reduce compromise. During times of crisis and change, users need to be warned to expect more phishing and social engineering attempts. It’s also useful to understand the psychology behind what makes people click.

This stretches beyond standard cybersecurity training. It’s about being empathic as I mentioned earlier, to what is going on inside and outside of the company. As much as we talk about external threats, we must be mindful to the increase in insider threats as well.

Insider threats

With all the changes that may be happening, we have to be mindful to how users are adapting and coping with the situation. We need to think about the stressors (fear and uncertainty about their jobs, balancing work and home life), and how this could impact a person.

Not all insider risks are malicious in intent. It can often come down to a lack of awareness of policies, knowledge, or frustration of not being able to work productively, that leads to mistakes. Conversely concerning behaviour, such as downloading or printing sensitive files, renaming files, using unapproved apps, or copying files onto external devices could be a sign of malicious intent.

While these behaviours don’t automatically arouse suspicion, it’s important to actively look for patterns of anomalous behaviour and mitigate them. With digital empathy, we can pre-empt and reduce some of the stressors or situations with wellbeing programmes and education that are empathetic and supportive to employees, reducing the chance of insider risks.

An effective security culture allows users to work productively while they help keep the business safe. Our built-in approach to security works across platforms, locations and tools – so it’s easier for your people to comply.

The future of security

One of the things we’ve learnt this year is to expect severe, but plausible scenarios. It can seem daunting to prepare for the extreme unknowns – but that’s what we have to do. Organisations are becoming more reliant on cloud and hybrid technologies. Therefore, successful strategies must include a people-based approach to cyber resilience. These four shifts, focussing on digital empathy and zero trust will help you to take advantage of innovative and integrated technologies that enable you to achieve more, with less.

Find out more

Get the guide to building resilience

How modern cybersecurity helps you stay productive and resilient

3 ways the banking sector can innovate in the new normal

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

Sarah Armstrong-Smith is a Chief Security Advisor in Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Solutions Group. She principally works with FSI customers in the UK and strategic customers across Europe, to help them evolve their security strategy and capabilities to support digital transformation and cloud adoption.

Sarah has a background in business continuity, disaster recovery, data protection and privacy, as well as crisis management. Combining these elements means she operates holistically to understand the cybersecurity landscape, and how this can be proactively enabled to deliver effective operational resilience.

Sarah has been recognised as one of the most influential women in UK Tech and UK cybersecurity and regularly contributes to thought leadership and industry publications.

The post 4 ways to drive the future of security in the financial sector appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

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The digital customer experience has never been more important. Consumers are more mindful about world problems such as global warming and others. All of this translates into expecting their banking provider to act as responsible corporate citizens while offering advanced digital experiences.

How technology can help drive innovation

 Before we take a look at the types of technology some financial organisations are using, remember that implementing technology isn’t ‘just because’. The real impact comes when you use technology to emphasise the following three areas:

• Customer insights: Produce correlations from dispensed internal data such as CRM, transactions, and investment stats.
• Intelligence: Merge customer insights with external data related to economic trends and behaviour.
• Customer engagement: Leverage data from customer insights and intelligence to deliver personalised customer experiences at the right time, through the right channel.

Here’s a teaser from our financial services whitepaper with three out of five ways organisations can use technology to drive innovation, build resilience, and be truly customer-focussed. Download the whitepaper to access the full guide.

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1. Public cloud infrastructure

If you’re looking to innovate into a digital-first model, you need strong cloud foundations. Public clouds can be deployed faster than on-premise infrastructures and there’s no extra cost of purchasing, managing, and maintaining on-premise infrastructures. Every employee can use the same application from any device, securely over the internet.

For finance organisations, compliance and security is very important. Microsoft Azure is built with a multi-layered security approach, with physical data centres, infrastructure and operations. There are 3,500 cyber security experts actively monitoring to protect your business assets and data. With over 90 compliance offerings, you can ensure valuable data is correctly safeguarded, and AI-driven security signals can also help modernise your security operations.

2. AI

Another way for organisations to empower employees is by using AI. AI-powered chatbots are ideal as a first point of contact, and can answer frequently asked questions. If customers need more help, they can move them onto customer service representatives.

AI can also be leveraged for knowledge mining and machine learning. This uncovers insights and analytics that can enable more informed business decisions. AI can test millions of ideas/scenarios per minute, uncovering insights and information such as credit risk scoring, identifying vulnerable customers, and interest rate changes. You can also test new business models rapidly. In the new normal, the ability to enrich existing data with external data will help build resilience within the organisation.

3. User experience

In the EY survey, 43 percent of respondents say the way they bank has changed. As customers are more used to digital ways of interacting, they expect financial institutions to adapt and innovate alongside them. Moving to mobile and web banking apps and leveraging new ways of delivering augmented experiences such as video conferencing, virtual reality, and augmented reality are key new business model enablers.

Citi traders, for example, is using the Microsoft HoloLens to see a virtual workstation that shows data as 3D images, making it easier to work and collaborate.

The new normal

In the new normal, competition will occur between business models rather than product and/or process innovations. Financial leaders should adjust their digital strategy to focus on supporting their customers with innovative ideas and empowering employees with new skills. When you think about how you’re planning on achieving your business goals in the new normal, make sure you build a skilling roadmap alongside. This will ensure there’s no skills gaps in your organisation.

Find out more

Download the report: Boosting the innovation of banking business models

Watch the on-demand webinar: How are traditional banks adapting their approach in a digital world?

About the authors

Tine Petric is a Specialist in the area of Applications and Infrastructure, advising organisations within the Financial Services Industry. He is passionate about the impact that technology can make in inclusive finance and ESG overall. Tine is also an avid tech blogger and guest lecturer at universities where he talks about Business Model Innovation and latest tech trends. Tine holds a Master Degree in Business Administration and Management from the HEC University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Christian Thier leads the Financial Services Account Team Organisation of Microsoft in Switzerland. He drives strategic and transformational partnerships with Banks and Financial Services firms across all segments, helping its clients to accelerate in digital business transformation. He has more than 20 years of working experience within the Banking, Insurance, Financial Services and IT industry in various roles. Before joining Microsoft, he was working at Interactive Data, serving as Managing Director and Board Member of Interactive Data in Switzerland, and Vice President Sales EMEA since 2005. Christian holds a Master Degree in Business Administration from the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

The post 3 ways the banking sector can innovate in the new normal appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.