Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

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Microsoft partners at Money20/20 USA 

Microsoft was proud to showcase powerful partnerships at Money20/20 USA, featuring many partner solutions driving AI transformation in the financial services industry.  

This included a suite of compelling demos from Microsoft partners including Temenos, Accenture-Avanade, Infosys, Backbase, Symphony AI, and Zafin. Accenture-Avanade demonstrated their Relationship Manager agent, which can improve relationship management across sales and services by freeing up capacity and enhancing client interaction quality. Additionally, Infosys’s Smart Agent and Smart Bank Assist showcased improvements to banking experiences for both employees and customers.  

Microsoft partners, including Cognizant, EY, Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), Personetics, D-iD, Integrate AI, and others, participated in theater sessions at the Microsoft booth. They presented their thought leadership around the most compelling AI-enabled use cases and deployment methods within banking and financial services. Additionally, Microsoft-sponsored panels with NVIDIA and BNY uncovered practical tips and considerations for scaling and deploying the latest AI technologies, further positioning Microsoft partners as thought leaders in the AI space. 

These collaborations reflect the Microsoft commitment to empowering partners to drive impactful, AI-powered solutions that help customers achieve their business goals and transform the future of financial services. 

Partners leading the way in delivering real-world AI value for financial services  

Taking a page from our Money20/20 USA presence, we’d like to share compelling examples where our partners are using AI to transform the banking experience, empower employees, help manage risk and compliance, and modernize core banking. These partnerships are not just exploring the possibilities of AI—they’re delivering concrete, measurable outcomes in the financial services space today.  

Transforming the banking experience 

Partners are transforming the banking experience by unlocking opportunities to enhance customer engagement. Backbase is delivering more compelling customer experiences around omni-channel for banking and wealth management based on their Engagement Banking Platform powered by Microsoft Azure AI. Capgemini, the Microsoft Global Financial Services Partner of the Year, has also driven AI innovation on the Microsoft platform, improving productivity and elevating the customer experience at financial services organizations worldwide.

“Capgemini and Microsoft have collaborated on enhancing business processes with Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI Service, helping banks and insurers better serve their customers. For instance, Capgemini recently helped a major Global bank streamline and accelerate its customer onboarding process with Microsoft Intelligent Document Processing, using AI Builder for structured documents and Azure OpenAI Service for unstructured documents. These technologies have saved an enormous amount of time developing impactful solutions for our customers.”

Vivek Desai, VP and Global Head, Microsoft CoE for Financial Services.

Additionally, global financial services solutions provider, VeriPark, is advancing custom agents that span 40 use cases across corporate and retail banking. 

 “[Collaboration] allows us to deliver cutting-edge AI solutions that not only enhance operational efficiency but also empower banks to provide personalized, real-time services to their clients.”

Özkan Erener, CEO, Veripark 

Empowering employees 

There are also meaningful opportunities for AI to empower banking employees to be more effective trusted advisors to their customers. Using Microsoft Fabric and Copilot, Finastra’s Assist.AI, powered by Azure OpenAI, is boosting trade finance employee productivity with intelligent features that enable users to better prioritize and more efficiently complete everyday lending tasks. In addition, Tata Consulting Services (TCS) is modernizing how they engage with customers via an agent designed to optimize communication between banks and their users across all customer engagement channels. 

Managing risk and compliance 

When it comes to mitigating risk and crime, partners are delivering new intelligent approaches. ASC is providing institutions with more decision-making power around managing fraud and risk, while SymphonyAI is consolidating enterprise-wide risk and compliance across their Sensa Investigation hub solution, powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure Open AI. Additionally, partners like Holistic AI are helping customers such as Mapfre identify and mitigate risks associated with AI, while harnessing their data to ensure transparency, fairness, and compliance.  

Modernizing core systems 

Microsoft partners are also using AI in the mission-critical task of modernizing payments and core banking for greater efficiency, transparency, and high-value outcomes such as unlocking new revenue streams, reducing operational costs, and enhancing customer satisfaction. Temenos is delivering banking-specific solutions to provide agility, security, and innovation—to help banking customers reduce operational costs and uphold responsible AI standards via their commitment to explainability, secure operations, and safe deployment practices. Zafin advanced their leading software-as-a-service transformation and modernization platform for banks with Azure AI; this includes their de-risked implementation process that generates a 50% reduction in time to market¹. 

“The introduction of generative AI and Microsoft Fabric from a data standpoint are crucial…”

Chris Dickin, Executive Vice President, Zafin 

Additionally, the collaboration among Microsoft, our partner Quantexa, and European bank Novo Banco has delivered advanced banking data estate modernization in the era of AI. 

Learn more about financial services solutions from Microsoft 

Whether you joined us in person at Money20/20 to see the latest AI innovations from Microsoft and our partners, or are just now discovering the difference our technologies and partners are making in the industry, we invite you to collaborate with us on your own transformative AI experiences. 

• Learn more about Microsoft solutions in the financial services industry and our work with key partners by visiting Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.  
• Learn how our partners are delivering industry-specific solutions faster with Microsoft Industry Clouds. 
• Visit our Solutions Partner learning path (which includes Microsoft Learn documentation, a playbook, and FAQs), and explore related financial services stories in our financial services industry blog.

¹Zafin launches Zafin IO and Zafin Data Fabric, a new offering to accelerate banking transformationThis offering will simplify integration processes, cut core modernization risks to support uninterrupted banking transformation, all while breaking down data silos and unlocking the power of banks’ first-party data – Zafin

The post Beyond Money20/20 USA: Microsoft partners redefining financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Consider, for example, that Americans who live past the age of 70 can expect on average to spend $172,000 for long-term care over their lifetimes.¹ But most families (as many as 83%²) say it would be impossible or very difficult to afford $60,000 for annual in-home or assisted living care expenses.

Life and health insurance companies are working to help bridge this ever-widening gap with long-term care insurance (LTCI). And thanks to a broad range of new innovations enabled by AI, Microsoft and our partners are helping to improve LTCI for policyholders and insurers alike. This is part of our vision for intelligent insurance and our work with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. 

In this case, helping to make long-term care more accessible and affordable is good not just for enhancing societal well-being and reducing the strain on public resources, but also for the viability of a critical insurance product.

The unique challenges of long-term care insurance

LTCI insures people for a very costly circumstance that is very likely to occur.

About 70% of seniors will require long-term care at some point in their lives,³ and Americans spend more than $471 billion annually for long-term care.⁴ Yet Medicaid covers only 42% of long-term costs. LTCI aims to address a significant portion of long-term care costs by covering a range of services for people who need assistance with daily living activities—for example, bathing, dressing, and eating—over an extended period, often provided at home.

Despite the prevalence and urgency of the need, however, LTCI has proven challenging for insurers. Rising healthcare costs and higher-than-expected claims have created unforeseen financial pressures. People are living longer, increasing the likelihood of needing to use LTCI, and fewer customers than expected are letting their policies lapse. For insurers, this results in profitability challenges and uncertainty, while customers face higher premiums, and thus reduced access.

How AI can help improve LTCI profitability and growth

The success of insurance companies in addressing the growing need for LTCI will depend on a variety of factors, including education, awareness, and the efficiency and effectiveness of regulation. Above all, technology holds the key for transformation in profitability and growth.

We are seeing tangible results in AI innovation with our insurance customers worldwide that have direct relevance for LTCI providers. These potential benefits are prompting many insurers to accelerate their cloud migration and data management investments—a transition that is key to the LTCI sector, which lags other insurance segments. With the scale, security, and resilience of the Microsoft Cloud combined with the advanced data and analytics capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and the AI development opportunities enabled by Azure AI Studio, insurance companies can innovate rapidly and confidently to meet their specific needs.

The future of insurance in the era of AI

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Here are some of the important benefits that insurers can apply to their LTCI offerings.

Enhance underwriting and claims management

AI can streamline underwriting and claims processing in ways that improve both accuracy and efficiency. One important area of focus is straight-through processing (STP)—the automation of an entire workflow, from the initial data entry to the final decision, without the need for human intervention. STP helps to reduce delays, minimize errors, and free up valuable human resources.

In the underwriting process, AI helps enable STP for tasks such as analyzing historical data, assessing risk factors, and predicting the likelihood of claims, which helps underwriters make more informed decisions and reduces the time required for manual reviews. It can also handle a larger volume of applications without a corresponding increase in resources.

In claims processing, STP can automate the assessment and triage of claims—for example, by quickly extracting and analyzing information from a wide range of documents, including medical records, policy applications, and claims forms. Many insurers have long used optical character recognition (OCR) technology to digitize these types of documents. But the addition of generative AI supercharges how they can be understood, evaluated, and acted upon.

Automate contact center experiences

With generative AI’s natural language processing and content creation capabilities, insurers can optimize contact center operations in ways that help both the customer and the company.

AI-enabled copilots and virtual assistants can handle larger volumes of routine inquiries, helping agents and customer service representatives provide faster, more accurate responses to policyholders’ questions about coverage, claims status, and more. For example, John Hancock implemented a new AI solution to provide support for common customer issues and questions, which helps call center representatives focus their efforts and expertise on the most complex cases, with better customer experiences and reduced wait times.

Automated systems can understand and respond to customer inquiries in a conversational way, and even authenticate caller identities with voice biometrics, streamlining the identification process and enhancing security. For LTCI, AI can enable corresponding benefits through more efficient operations, better resource allocation, and enhanced customer experiences.

Prevent fraud, waste, and abuse

In the realm of fraud detection, advanced analytics and AI-powered tools can analyze vast amounts of data from healthcare vendor invoices to identify patterns and anomalies indicative of fraudulent activities in a timely manner. With better insights, insurers can proactively detect and prevent fraud, helping ensure that legitimate claims are processed swiftly while minimizing financial losses.

AI can also help insurers identify unusual patterns or anomalies that could indicate fraudulent or wasteful activities, such as flagging a particular facility if it consistently submits higher-than-average claims for certain treatments. Analyzing historical data can also help inform insurers to create more robust, data-driven processes to determine which facilities to audit or to benchmark best-in-class operators.

Expedite regulatory, contracting, and auditing activities

LTCI is inundated with regulatory, contracting, and auditing activities, many of which rely on cumbersome manual processes. AI can improve the efficiency of many of these workflows while also improving accuracy, turn-around times, and regulatory compliance. Data validation, risk assessment, and regulatory monitoring can all benefit. Moreover, AI’s predictive analytics can spot potential compliance issues, and its enhanced reporting capabilities can aid strategic decision-making.

Advancing LTCI with AI and Microsoft

We believe that with focused, creative innovation with AI, LTCI providers and their customers can look forward to a bright future in which more people can live with dignity and financial security in their senior years, thanks to high-quality, robust insurance products and services. We are excited to work with industry and our global partner ecosystem to strengthen LTCI, in line with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles and our Secure Future Initiative. 

To learn more about all our solutions, visit our Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services website.

¹AARP, “Long-Term Care Costs May Double to $5.6 Trillion by 2047,” March 2018.

²KFF, “The Affordability of Long-Term Care and Support Services: Findings from a KFF Survey,” November 2023.

³Morningstar, “100 Must-Know Statistics About Long-Term Care: 2023 Edition,” March 2023.

⁴A Place for Mom, “Long-Term Care Statistics,” September 2023.

The post How AI is improving long-term care insurance for insurers and customers alike appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

This powerful advantage is now available with Meeting Prep for Financial Services (preview), the newest addition to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and an innovation from Microsoft’s long-term strategic partnership with LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group). The new app, built and optimized for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, offers deep links and interoperability with LSEG’s next-generation data and analytics workflow solution, LSEG Workspace, to augment the workflow experience. 

Meeting Prep for Financial Services empowers investment bankers and other professionals in client-facing roles by helping to save time preparing for client meetings, improve client engagement and decision-making, and streamline client communications. For professionals in firms with a Microsoft Teams license and LSEG Workspace license, the app fosters collaborative workflows and boosts productivity. Generally available in December 2024 and now in public preview, Meeting Prep for Financial Services is an important milestone in the LSEG and Microsoft partnership launched in 2022 to jointly develop new products and services for data and analytics.  

“We are thrilled with the positive reaction from our customers, who have highlighted the significant time savings and efficiency benefits they are experiencing with Meeting Prep for Financial Services. By integrating market-leading data and analytics from LSEG Workspace with Microsoft’s generative AI capabilities, we are empowering financial professionals to prepare for client meetings more effectively and make more informed decisions.”

Nej D’Jelal, Group Head, LSEG Workspace Platform 

How our financial services customers and partners are advancing with AI 

Innovation is happening in every corner of financial services as organizations engage with Microsoft and our global partners. According to the Gartner 2025 CIO Agenda: Top Priorities and Technology Plans for Banking, “the biggest expected changes in technology investments are generative AI (39%), cyber security/information security (34%), and AI (33%).”¹ Such innovation requires a strong foundation of security, privacy, and trust, which is why we place special emphasis on safeguarding data, taking robust privacy measures, and committing to responsible AI principles. Security is a top company-wide priority for Microsoft, and our Secure Future Initiative reflects our commitment to continually advancing the built-in security of our products and services. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services offers this foundation with services and solutions tailored to the industry, empowering firms to achieve impactful business outcomes quickly—whether transforming the customer experience, empowering employees, managing risk and compliance, or modernizing core systems. Organizations can drive innovation and improve resilience by taking advantage of fit-for-purpose platform services. And with Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered analytics platform, firms can unite their data, improve collaboration, and reduce the cost and effort of AI development, while simplifying governance and enhancing security. 

Transforming the customer experience 

The importance of data in customer experiences is magnified when viewed through the lens of the customer journey—in every place, time, and channel that a customer interacts with their financial institution. To deliver better service and more meaningful interactions, firms need to create seamless, consistent experiences and provide a complete view of the relationship.  

A great example is how Microsoft and BlackRock are partnering to build next-generation solutions for the company’s Aladdin investment management platform, which runs entirely on Microsoft Azure. BlackRock last year launched a new generative AI tool for its private markets platform, and is now launching the new Aladdin Copilot, which surfaces answers instantly to support key business decisions and enable better decision-making.  

Many other firms are reshaping how they deliver experiences, products, and services through generative AI. ERGO Insurance has revolutionized its customer service in just four months using an AI Virtual Agent powered by Azure, developed by EBO. Virgin Money has developed an award-winning virtual assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to enhance the omnichannel customer experience. First National Bank has improved customer communications with Microsoft Copilot for Sales, ensuring client responses reflect understanding of their requests. And CommBank is using generative AI to deliver personalized customer experiences and help protect against fraud, scams, and financial abuse.

Empowering employees

With the right communications and collaboration tools, employees can be dramatically more effective in addressing business needs and servicing customers. The first and often most powerful way to benefit from generative AI is to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, which recently launched a new wave of features as well as enhancements to Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps. A recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester, commissioned by Microsoft, projects 112 to 457% projected ROI using Copilot for three years, and 30% reduction in new-hire onboarding time.²  

Beyond Copilot, customers are using Azure OpenAI Service to build custom agents and generative AI applications. These also offer significant ROI. Another recent Forrester TEI study in the financial services and insurance sector, also commissioned by Microsoft, suggests that organizations deploying solutions on Azure OpenAI Service can expect increased average revenue per client of 3 to 7% by year 3, and a time savings in content generation efficiency of 30 to 60%.³  

Across the industry, our customers are realizing important productivity benefits in AI innovation. For example, Moody’s launched a custom enterprise copilot that is enhancing productivity and innovation for its 14,000 employees, which they launched in less than 30 days. 

“Financial institutions are confronting the demand for immediate insights amidst an overwhelming surge of data. Microsoft’s Azure and generative AI solutions are pivotal in navigating this challenge by simplifying and democratizing access through copilots, enabling our customers to process an unprecedented volume of data with unparalleled speed.”

Nick Reed, Chief Product Officer, Moody’s Analytics 

Elsewhere, financial advisors at Hargreaves Lansdown are saving two to three hours per week on average, using new AI-powered tools to complete client documentation four times faster than before. Using Azure OpenAI Service, AXA developed its AXA Secure GPT platform in three months, applying generative AI responsibly and with high data safety. And staff at Akbank are saving three minutes per customer support interaction with a new chatbot that can search 10,000 records in seconds. 

Managing risk and compliance  

As financial services firms rely more on technology to operate and innovate, it is increasingly critical to ensure that systems meet regulatory requirements and operate with the reliability, resilience, and security the industry demands.  

The growing reliance on technology has prompted regulatory action around the world, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the European Union, a regulation designed to improve the stability and security of the industry. With DORA and other key efforts, Microsoft is actively engaged with regulators and is focused on helping customers achieve smooth and comprehensive compliance. This includes participation in consortia such as the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), where we are joining other industry leaders in the development of a groundbreaking AI governance framework for financial institutions. 

Helping meet compliance needs

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Technology also plays a key role in regulatory compliance. Based on the Azure landing zone—a secure, scalable cloud foundation tailored for compliance needs—we are introducing a new FSI landing zone. Available in November 2024, this infrastructure-as-code provides the baseline governance, resilience, security, automation, and prescriptive guidance needed to help financial services organizations and our industry partners meet the strict, non-negotiable compliance requirements of the industry.   

The move to the cloud can likewise accelerate more effective risk management. Bank of Montreal, for example, has migrated its market risk management platform to Azure and realized a sixfold reduction in analysis time, a doubling of speed in job time, and a 30% cost savings. And Belgian bank Belfius has deployed the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform to assess risks, meet regulatory standards, and more quickly identify unusual behaviors.  

Enhancing security

On the security front, financial services organizations are among the most targeted in the world. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the escalating cost of cybercrime will reach USD10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from USD3 trillion a decade ago.⁴ The increasingly dangerous threat landscape compels firms to better safeguard critical systems, enhance data protection, and maintain compliance with a host of regulations.  

To help cyber defense teams work more effectively amid chronic talent shortages, Microsoft Copilot for Security empowers analysts to rapidly assess an organization’s security posture and create actionable insights and solutions at much greater speed than current approaches. At Intesa Sanpaolo Group, Copilot for Security is speeding the work of threat hunters and empowering junior staff to ramp up dramatically faster. And at Barclays, Microsoft’s security solutions are helping to better detect, investigate, respond to, and protect against security threats.  

Modernizing core systems 

The promise of AI is motivating many institutions to rethink their reliance on legacy systems and migrate mission-critical workloads to the cloud, while also adopting a modern data and analytics platform like Microsoft Fabric. With the significant AI and agent investments we’re seeing across our customer base, the need for a robust data estate strategy is even more critical.  

The collaboration among Microsoft, our partner Quantexa, and European bank Novo Banco is a great example of data estate modernization in the era of AI—combining the power of the Quantexa Decision Intelligence Platform with Microsoft Fabric’s advanced analytics capabilities. 

Modernization also delivers important benefits in agility, resilience, compliance, and costs. In Singapore, CapitaLand Investment has moved to a unified data platform that streamlined data operations across all business units, saving over SGD1 million in operational costs and more than 10,000 worker-days per year. Likewise, Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) has upgraded its application infrastructure to Azure, which has been key to quadrupling their client base, and has reduced the time to deploy new services from three months to as little as one day. And Zavarovalnica Triglav is reimagining insurance workflows in Slovenia with automated responses and smart rerouting of customer inquiries, reducing the need for manual intervention by around half for certain requests. 

Looking ahead 

As these and so many other examples demonstrate, AI makes it possible to innovate across the business while maintaining trust with customers, clients, regulators, and within the organization. Microsoft and our partners are poised with both solutions and services on which the industry can depend, and we look forward to continuing the journey with every customer. 

• See Microsoft Learn for more information on Meeting Prep for Financial Services, including guidance on how to participate in the public preview.
• Explore refreshed documentation for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, the scalable, industry-tailored platform that helps financial services organizations unlock business value and deepen customer relationships.
• Read our blog, 3 ways Microsoft is helping the financial industry prepare for new DORA regulations, to learn more about how Microsoft is helping the financial services industry prepare for DORA.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

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¹Gartner, 2025 CIO Agenda: Top Priorities and Technology Plans for Banking, by Pete Redshaw, September 16, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

² Forrester, “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Copilot For Microsoft 365,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, April 2024.

³ Forrester, “Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service Driving Productivity Gains To Enable New Ways To Engage Clients In Financial Services And Insurance,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, July 2024.

⁴ Cybercrime Magazine, “Cybercrime To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025,” November 2020.

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The financial services industry is entering a new era of generative AI, creating new opportunities and redefining business practices. Microsoft and BlackRock’s strategic partnership is at the forefront of this evolution, exemplifying the potential of AI to redefine industry standards, enhance client experiences, and set new industry standards.  

Advancements in generative AI are leading to more tailored investment management solutions, empowering users to make informed decisions more quickly and manage risks more effectively. This transformation is reshaping client journeys, enhancing analytics, and increasing automation across the sector. By using AI, financial institutions can offer more personalized services, improve operational efficiency, and stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.

Together, Microsoft and BlackRock are pioneering the future of financial services, combining technology and human expertise to deliver unparalleled value to clients worldwide. 

Working together to drive financial innovation 

The partnership between BlackRock and Microsoft takes advantage of AI to transform the financial services industry and bring enhanced capabilities to BlackRock and its clients—which include some of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors and wealth managers. This empowers financial services customers to drive transformation and continuous innovation. 

BlackRock’s Aladdin is a technology platform hosted on Microsoft Azure that unifies the investment management process through a common data model. Offering users a whole portfolio view, across public and private markets, Aladdin is recognized as a category-leading, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that enables scale, provides insights, and supports true business transformation.  

With Microsoft products, BlackRock is using AI technology to optimize workflows and generate insights across the firm. Azure’s open application programming interface (API) surface, for example, enables Aladdin to accelerate AI innovation. Through this partnership, BlackRock and Microsoft push each other to innovate and build products that meet the demanding (and evolving) standards of the financial services industry, and the high standards BlackRock has as both a fiduciary and global technology provider—all with an eye toward a future where investment management is more accessible, insightful, and able to deliver unique outcomes. 

Transforming user experiences with agents 

In this transformative AI landscape, agents emerge as a pivotal innovation, tailored to the specific needs and experiences of each application and exemplifying the integration of generative AI into the fabric of financial services. Agents are designed to support human experts with data-driven insights and recommendations, helping financial advisors navigate complex and uncertain scenarios like market volatility, regulatory changes, and cyber threats. By using agents, customers can better align their financial objectives—such as planning for retirement savings, pursuing investment growth, or handling debt management. 

Philosophically, Microsoft envisions an agent as part of the team—fundamentally changing how we work and reflecting the company’s mission to empower everyone on the planet.

Agents as conversational interfaces mark a transition from one-sided interactions with computers to a bi-directional dialogue in natural language, setting a new standard for user experiences across industries. Over time, agents incorporated with Microsoft and industry-specific applications will evolve to automate approved actions on behalf of users, driving improvements in efficiency and accuracy.  

In this vein, in 2023, Aladdin launched eFront Copilot, a generative AI tool for its private markets’ platform. Through eFront copilot, users can unlock new efficiencies and insights—with functionalities that allow them to access quick analytics and visualize factors such as risk and performance. 

The AI-enabled, better-informed future of financial services 

From automation to machine learning and natural language processing, artificial intelligence has been a part of BlackRock’s DNA for years. Alongside eFront Copilot, the company also launched new AI capabilities for Aladdin clients through Aladdin Copilot. Now available to Aladdin clients, Aladdin Copilot serves to strengthen the connections across the Aladdin platform, surfacing answers instantly to support key business decisions—uncovering actionable information faster and advancing more effective, relevant decision making. 

Aladdin Copilot is making Aladdin more intelligent and responsive—enhancing productivity, enabling scale, and providing ever-more insights within the Aladdin platform. 

Key features include: 

• An intuitive user experience to access immediate answers—empowering every user to be an Aladdin expert.
• Configurable experiences that increase efficiency and make the Aladdin platform your own.
• Permission-dependent access to insights that enable better-informed decision making. 

Additionally, users can access Aladdin Copilot securely on the Aladdin platform, ensuring data privacy and risk controls are in place to protect their data. Aladdin Copilot is built with the principles of responsible AI, helping to ensure that organizations can maximize its potential benefits while minimizing risks. As part of this commitment to responsibility, Aladdin Copilot contains content filtering and parameters to limit risk of hallucination, misinformation, or inappropriate outputs. Further, Aladdin Copilot will not give investment advice or respond to questions outside the Aladdin platform boundaries.  

As its features continue to progress, Aladdin Copilot will be able to facilitate faster onboarding of new users, generate reports, summarize research, prompt proactive alerts—and more. Additionally, as AI evolves from query-driven to autonomous agents, platforms like Aladdin will expand their capabilities even further. Autonomous agents will help execute complex tasks, and continuously learn from interactions, offering advanced support, streamlined operations, and deeper insights. Microsoft is actively developing these autonomous agents to help manage routine inquiries, automate tasks, analyze data, deliver personalized experiences, and scale operations seamlessly—enabling partners to offer better services, make smarter decisions, and achieve greater success. 

Balancing innovation with security and compliance  

The introduction of AI promises to revolutionize work, but this is not just about reducing the number of steps in a process. It is about integrating AI in a way that deepens the quality of our insights, enriches accessibility, and automates well understood actions for efficiency all while preserving the critical human elements of oversight and control. Applying AI strategically equips clients with intelligent and secure tools that are responsive to the financial landscape. This careful balance of innovation and risk management is crucial for the positive evolution of the industry. With proper data management and governance, the industry can create responsible AI, empowering users to make informed decisions and manage risks effectively.  

As AI becomes more prevalent in financial services, ensuring security and compliance is paramount. Implementing robust data management and governance frameworks supports the creation of AI applications that adhere to regulatory requirements and protect sensitive information. This commitment to security and compliance builds trust with clients and stakeholders, fostering a secure environment for innovation. 

Microsoft and BlackRock are setting the stage for the future of financial services, where technology and human expertise combine to create unparalleled value for clients worldwide. By strategically leveraging AI, ensuring security and compliance, empowering users, fostering innovation, balancing automation with human oversight, and building a sustainable future, we are engineering success for today and tomorrow. 

Learn more 

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Explore how BlackRock is using emerging tech to create innovative solutions for clients. 

Disclaimer: BlackRock’s Aladdin® platform is a financial technology platform designed for institutional, wholesale, qualified, and professional investor/client use only and is not intended for end investor use.

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Keeping the financial sector resilient in a fast-changing world is a global challenge, shared by leading firms, government regulators, and technology providers like Microsoft. In fact, it is a tenet of our work in Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, and is closely aligned with Microsoft’s commitment to making security our top priority in our products and services. 

Since 2020, officials in the European Union (EU) have been working on a new set of sweeping regulations to address the industry’s increasing reliance on technology, and to mitigate the associated risks. DORA—the Digital Operational Resilience Act—took effect on January 16, 2023, and becomes effective on January 17, 2025, impacting virtually every financial firm operating in the EU and the many critical third-party service providers who support them. Microsoft has been actively engaged in working with regulators and financial entities concerning the development of DORA and is now focused on helping customers enable smooth and comprehensive compliance under it. 

What is DORA? 

DORA is a major new EU regulation designed to strengthen the operational resilience of financial services by ensuring that firms maintain strong risk management practices and can withstand and adapt to a wide range of threats and disruptions. The regulation is part of a broader EU strategy to improve the stability and security of the industry and to harmonize requirements across member states. DORA applies to financial services entities operating in the EU, as well as the technology companies who provide third-party services to them that are critical for such entities. 

Under DORA, financial services entities will be required to implement robust cybersecurity incident response plans and promptly report breaches and other cyber incidents and disruptions to authorities. Firms will need to build business continuity plans that let them keep operating in the event of a major disruption, including having exit plans for more serious scenarios. And they will be subject to increased scrutiny by financial supervisory authorities, who will monitor and assess their operational resilience, and take action to ensure compliance if need be. 

DORA also imposes requirements for third-party Information and Communication Technology (ICT) service providers, with a primary (though not exclusive) focus on ICT companies who provide cloud computing products and services that help support key functions. The regulation also creates a new designation of “critical” providers (which likely would include Microsoft) who will be subject to a new oversight framework by the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs). 

DORA’s impact on financial services customers 

For financial services, DORA will require firms to adhere to many new or enhanced requirements. Among them: 

• Risk management of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) service providers Financial firms will need to establish a comprehensive management framework for ICT risks, integrated into their overall risk management systems. The framework covers core technology and security considerations including identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. It also encompasses strategies, policies, procedures, and tools to ensure the security and resilience of systems, information assets, and data.
• Incident management and reporting
  Firms will be required to put processes in place to detect, manage, and report major ICT-related incidents to authorities on tight timeframes. Incidents such as cybersecurity breaches, service disruptions, and data loss will be evaluated on criteria such as number of clients affected, duration, and economic impact.
• Operational resilience testing
  DORA will require that digital operational tests, such as threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) and vulnerability assessments, be conducted on critical ICT systems and applications. These tests aim to ensure timely recovery and business continuity in the event of disruptions.
• Contractual commitments
  DORA mandates specific contractual requirements between ICT service providers and financial services entities. These include requirements regarding audit, business continuity, exit planning, and the use of key subcontractors. Moreover, before entering into contracts with ICT providers, firms must conduct pre-contractual risk assessments, including such considerations as evaluating the provider’s security measures, compliance status, and financial stability.  

How Microsoft is helping customers to comply with DORA  

As a major ICT service provider, Microsoft has established robust internal governance processes to prepare for and comply with all applicable provisions as a critical third-party technology vendor, and we will equally endeavor to support regulated financial institutions in meeting their requirements under DORA. This includes aligning contractual provisions with the mandates of DORA and providing built-in ICT risk management capabilities across a broad range of Microsoft cloud and enterprise product offerings. 

Here are three important ways that we are helping customers meet the challenges of DORA:

1. To help customers successfully meet their contractual commitments under DORA, we are now working closely to update contract terms as required and applicable by the new regulation. This includes ensuring smooth pre-contractual risk assessments of Microsoft products and services, and fully defining the specific aspects of their obligations that dovetail with our offerings. We are also working with customers for input to update our contracts, as needed, so they remain fit for purpose under the DORA framework.
2. To help customers manage ICT risks and establish an internal governance and control framework, we provide in our products and services a broad set of built-in ICT risk management capabilities required by DORA. For example, on aspects related to information protection concerns, Microsoft Defender for Cloud performs continuous threat assessment, detection, and response, and Microsoft Secure Score helps assess and improve security posture across workloads. Likewise, for other aspects, such as incident management, resilience testing, and incident information sharing, vital functionality is provided by corresponding Microsoft offerings, including Microsoft Purview, Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard, and Azure Service Health.
3. To help customers with incident management, classification, and reporting, our security and compliance offerings provide sophisticated capabilities for supporting incident management requirements, including tools and services for efficient incident detection and investigation, as well ensuring timely incident reporting and response as required. Azure Security Center, for example, ensures timely detection and response, and Microsoft 365 Health dashboard and Microsoft Defender work together to provide a comprehensive approach to incident management, classification, and reporting.  

Why DORA matters to global financial services 

DORA represents a significant step forward in strengthening the operational resilience of the financial services sector. By standardizing how entities manage, report, and work together to minimize ICT risks, DORA aims to protect the financial system from a wide range of threats and disruptions.  

DORA is not simply a new regulatory framework for the EU. Rather, it is an important milestone on the road to broader financial services resilience around the world, fostering an important emphasis on information sharing, transparency, and collective responsibility that promise to unlock the full potential of cloud and AI, while keeping businesses and their customers safer.  

Microsoft’s commitment to helping ensure compliance with DORA 

Microsoft is working intensively with our financial services customers to ensure a smooth and productive pathway to DORA compliance, while also preparing to meet the requirements under DORA that would apply to Microsoft on the basis of our designation as a critical ICT service provider. 

This is only a continuation of the investments we have made for over a decade in working with regulatory agencies to address common needs and challenges, and building products to help financial services firms strengthen cyber resilience in an evolving regulatory environment.  

We see DORA as a natural step forward to advance operational resilience in financial services, and we will continue working with regulators in other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, which are implementing measures that harmonize with DORA. 

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Learn more 

To learn more about DORA and how Microsoft can help with cyber resilience in financial services, see these resources:

• To learn how Microsoft products and services map to the requirements under DORA, see Microsoft Product to DORA Regulation Guide for Customers.
• Visit our website to learn more about how Microsoft empowers financial services companies to achieve more.
• To learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to the advancement of ethical AI, see the Microsoft responsible AI standard.
• Discover more information on how Microsoft addresses threat and vulnerability management. 

The post 3 ways Microsoft is helping the financial industry prepare for new DORA regulations appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Private equity firms are enticed by the new technology’s promise of transformation in operations and innovation. However, in the heavily risk-aware business of acquisition, management, and monetization of private companies, leaders are also keenly interested in use cases and user experiences that demonstrate value in both the near-term and long-term.

Helping these companies to navigate effective strategies to adopt generative AI and modern cloud solutions is our primary focus and a tenet of our work with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. Private equity leaders recognize that business transformation also means disruption, which is why solid evidence of the near-term value and impact of generative AI is an important key to success.

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The impact of AI in private equity transformation

Generative AI can transform the way private equity firms do business in a variety of ways. Here are just three areas in which it offers significant potential gains in return on investment (ROI):

• Due diligence accelerated. Generative AI can help accelerate the process of investing in assets by automating and improving various aspects of the investigation and evaluation process. It can streamline information gathering from financial statements, identify trends in financial documents and reports, and analyze contracts, legal documents, and compliance records.
  • Generative AI use case: By parsing financial statements, legal documents, and industry reports, a copilot identifies hidden risks and anomalies related to a potential investment opportunity with the goal of avoiding costly mistakes.
• Deal sourcing (origination) efficiency. Generative AI can help firms better identify and evaluate potential investment opportunities in ways that increase speed and create competitive advantages. It can retrieve, summarize, and extract insights from multiple unstructured data sources, automate the generation of documents like requests for proposals (RFPs) and contracts, and automate processes.
  • Generative AI use case: By quickly analyzing vast sets of data and documents, a copilot identifies potential investment targets faster and more accurately than before, resulting in a broader deal pipeline and better odds of finding lucrative opportunities.
• Portfolio optimization. Generative AI can help enhance operational efficiency and decision-making related to maximizing the performance and value of a portfolio of investments. It can aid in asset allocation decisions through fast insights, improve efficiency by automating key processes, and improve information sharing by making institutional knowledge instantly available. For example, scenario analysis can help assess the impact of different market conditions on a portfolio.
  • Generative AI use case: A firm can analyze and prioritize investments based on potential returns and strategic fit.

An easy first step in AI innovation: Copilot for Microsoft 365

The scope of possibilities in deploying generative AI in private equity is so broad as to sometimes feel overwhelming.

Many firms are initiating long-term innovation with the goal of building customized AI services and products for both internal and customer-facing purposes. For example, Moody’s is now focused on developing generative AI-powered data, analytics, research, collaboration, and risk solutions for financial services, as part of a strategic partnership with Microsoft.

This level of innovation includes developing customized generative AI applications—chatbots and plugins, for example—built on a rich cloud platform for enterprise such as Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Studio that enable the development and deployment of responsible AI solutions.

Powerful as they are, these innovations require time and planning. In the meantime, many companies also want solutions that can be put to work right away to deliver immediate benefits. This is why Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is so compelling for many financial services organizations. Designed as a real-time, intelligent assistant integrated deeply into the Microsoft 365 applications that most employees use on a regular basis, Copilot for Microsoft 365 promises to deliver the new value in the near term.

A brilliant digital assistant, or “AI-powered search engine”?

For companies now successfully deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365, the results are impressive. Microsoft research indicates that a company’s productivity and efficiency can be dramatically improved. For example, 70% of people using Copilot reported being more productive and 77% said that once they got up to speed with it, they didn’t want to give it up.¹

The key to such success is getting up to speed—or, more precisely, understanding how to begin using Copilot.

When fully deployed in an enterprise environment, Copilot appears in many places across applications and even within documents, as a small icon integrated into a toolbar or workspace. Click it, and a window opens inviting you to engage—and away you go.

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However, one bit of feedback we often hear is that users have only vague ideas of what Copilot can actually do. Lacking guidance and drawing on known paradigms, people often tend to use it like a search engine—in other words, they ask for information based on keywords. Copilot is adept at that, but only as an entry into the real power of AI. Copilot knows and understands huge swaths of data across the enterprise, and draws on it to conduct analysis, perform research, provide insights, explain things, and create entirely new artifacts.

To get such benefits, it is important to understand how to query the technology—in other words, to do what we call “prompt engineering.”

The key to unlocking value: A great prompt

The effectiveness of any natural language-based interaction with a generative AI application depends largely on the quality and specificity of the prompt you submit to it. A well-crafted prompt is essential to generating useful results. A prompt can be a question, a statement, a set of keywords, or even a more complex set of instructions.

This is where a quick demonstration can highlight the true power of Copilot. Try it for yourself. If your company has licensed and enabled Copilot for Microsoft 365 across the business, click the Copilot icon on your browser (be sure to toggle it to Work mode) or on Copilot for Microsoft Teams, and cut-and-paste the following prompt:

• “Summarize my emails, Teams messages, and channel messages from the last workday and today. List action items in a dedicated column. Suggest follow-ups if possible in a dedicated column. The table should look like this: Type (Mail/Teams /Channel) | Topic | Summarization | Action Item | Follow Up. If I have been directly mentioned, make the font of the topic bold.”

In a few moments, Copilot will generate a table that looks like this:

For more fun, experiment with prompts like these:

• “Summarize where I was mentioned in email, Teams messages, and channel messages in the last 24 hours. Use that information to prioritize my top three action items for today.”
• “Summarize my emails, Teams messages, and channel messages for the last six weeks about the <project or topic>. List action items in a dedicated column.”

This exercise, while enlightening, is just the tip of the iceberg in what Copilot can deliver. Functionally speaking, adding Copilot to private equity operations can assist a team with tasks such as researching, monitoring, structuring, supporting processes, and making informed recommendations.

Once a company’s users are fully empowered on prompt engineering, the door is open to realizing greater value in the investments the firm makes with generative AI.

Learn more and move forward

Every AI journey is unique, and the best way to start is to engage with Microsoft or a global partner to explore options and opportunities. To learn more about how Microsoft can help financial services organizations unlock business value and deepen client relationships, see the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services website. To get started with Copilot for Microsoft 365, contact your Microsoft support team or technology partner.

• For more guidance and a complete set of resources, check out the Copilot Success Kit.
• To learn more on “the art of prompting” and getting the most from generative AI, see the Copilot Lab.
• For more on the impact of Copilot on business productivity, see the Work Trend Index Special Report.
• For a roadmap to create business value with AI, see The AI Strategy Roadmap. 

¹What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work?, Microsoft, November 2023.

The post Unlock generative AI value in private equity: AI use cases and prompts appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

To keep abreast of the opportunities surrounding these changes, many central banks are actively experimenting with the idea of issuing digital versions of national currency, in the form of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This promising new form of digital money is made possible by advanced technology, which Microsoft is helping to enable through our global technology partner network. It is part of our commitment to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, which helps banks and other businesses unlock business value and deepen customer relationships. 

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How CBDCs are unique among digital currencies 

The growing preference for digitized money and payments has generated waves of innovation across governments, banks, and the global financial system. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have demonstrated the potential value of new forms of digital currency. But because cryptocurrencies are unregulated, they remain too volatile to be widely trusted and broadly accepted as legal tender. 

By contrast, CBDCs are digital assets issued backed by a nation’s monetary authority, or central bank. A CBDC is a digital form of fiat money (or government-decreed currency) which shares the essential properties of a nation’s cash: the same denominations, values, liquidity, and stability; the same financial liability to the central bank; and the same applicability for any type of payment—extending the functionality of the country’s currency. CBDCs remain interoperable with existing financial structures and are reliably overseen by the central bank. 

Initially intended for use in wholesale banking with the prospect of extending to the retail banking system, CBDCs offer compelling benefits as compared to cash and current digital financial tools. These benefits include: 

• Streamlined cross-border payments enabled by reduced reliance on intermediaries, with benefits in lower transaction costs and improved transparency in international transactions. 
• Integrated smart contracts (basically, self-executing contracts with terms of an agreement written into code), which can automate and enforce terms. These provide a high level of efficiency and precision and offer composability (the ability to create and combine modular services and products across complex systems). 
• Liquidity and settlement finality. CBDC assets can be readily converted into other forms of money or assets, which facilitates a seamless flow and instantaneous settlement without delay or risk of reversal. 
• More accessible government-to-person payments, such as tax refunds or stimulus funds, with direct deposits into digital wallets that don’t require bank accounts. 
• New formats for payments and transfers, which are enabled through efficient processes that are usually not feasible with traditional payment systems (for example, by means of crypto wallets.)
• Financial inclusion through easier access to financial services, particularly for unbanked populations in developing countries, such as through offline payments. 

For these and other reasons, CBDCs hold enormous market potential. The annual value of transactions involving CBDCs is projected to reach USD213 billion by 2030, a remarkable growth rate of over 260,000% in just seven years.²  

The Drex project: How Microsoft is working with the Brazilian Central Bank 

In their earliest iterations, CBDCs are being introduced into national and regional economies in limited circulation, offered alongside cash as an equivalent monetary option, with the possibility of becoming more broadly circulated as they become more popular and accepted. Currently, more than 130 countries are exploring or developing CBDC initiatives, with varying degrees of maturity. Progress in the United States is nascent, while China has the world’s largest pilot in the world, with 260 million digital wallets.³  

Brazil is one of the earliest nations to pilot CBDC as it moves to build a more modern digital economy. Microsoft and our partners are working with Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) and commercial banks to help develop a solution for its CBDC, known as Drex.⁴ It will be one of the most advanced CBDC initiatives in the world. 

Drex is designed to help advance and democratize the nation’s economy by broadening access to intelligent financial services with greater ease and lower costs. A key feature is tokenization—creating digital representations of financial assets—which opens the door to many new options for trading and transactions. Tokens are managed on a distributed ledger technology (DLT) to ensure a secure, shared, and decentralized environment for transactions. This can make financial services more programmable, standardized, and secure, while ensuring optimal privacy.  

Drex could also be integrated into Brazil’s fast payment system, called PIX, which allows for quick and efficient transactions, and even with the global payments network SWIFT. Longer term, it also aligns with the innovative Finternet framework and Unified Ledger concept proposed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to transform the global financial system. 

Empowering economies with CBDC initiatives worldwide 

The Drex project is a long-term effort that entered the second phase of its development in June 2024, which will continue for another 14 months with extensive privacy testing and new use cases. Ensuring the privacy and security of CBDC transactions is critical, so Microsoft and our partners, BCB, commercial banks,⁵ and other interested parties are working together to meet emerging requirements and ensure appropriate safeguards. 

Elsewhere, Microsoft is engaged in early CBDC initiatives in nations around the world. For example, we’re members of the Ensemble Project proposed by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), which aims to develop a set of industry standards to support interoperability among wholesale CBDCs, tokenized money, and tokenized assets.⁶ 

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to empower a CBDC project like Drex in several critical ways: 

• Infrastructure support: The Microsoft Azure platform provides robust infrastructure, AI services, and enterprise security—combined with our deep expertise with blockchain and other technologies critical for the design and implementation of a secure, scalable, and interoperable CBDC platform. 
• Privacy and security: Azure provides a broad catalog of security services that can be used as perimeters protecting CBDCs, with innovations such as a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) solution (called ZKP Nova) to help ensure privacy for digital assets. Additionally, Microsoft Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) provides features to assure customers that data is inaccessible to unauthorized third parties including cloud service providers.  
• AI innovation: Generative AI copilots, for example, can help create smart contracts, analyze document inputs, write code, and identify vulnerabilities and risks. 
• Global reach and availability: Azure has a global network of datacenters, which enables central banks to deploy CBDC solutions in proximity to their users—reducing latency and ensuring high availability.  
• Robust partner ecosystem: Innovation in CBDC solutions is spearheaded by Microsoft’s vibrant global network of partners and developers, who can provide central banks with access to expertise, best practices, and pre-built solutions, such as a CBDC sandbox. 

Explore the possibilities of CBDC with Microsoft 

Microsoft is excited to share our insights and expertise on CBDCs with nations and commercial banks across the global financial ecosystem. For more details on Microsoft’s work on the Drex project and our participation in FEBRABAN TECH 2024 in São Paulo, Brazil, see our press release.

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.

¹When – and why – did people first start using money? The Conversation.

²Jupiter Research, CBDC Transactions to Exceed $213bn by 2030, as Pilots Accelerate Rapidly, August 2023.

³ The Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker, The Atlantic Council.

⁴See Drex – Digital Brazilian Real (bcb.gov.br) and Piloto Drex (bcb.gov.br).

⁵Microsoft, CONSÓRCIO CAIXA, ELO E MICROSOFT REALIZA A 1ª COMPRA DE TÍTULOS PÚBLICOS POR MEIO DO DREX EM LEILÃO DO TESOURO NACIONAL, October 2023.

⁶Hong Kong Monetary Authority – HKMA establishes the Project Ensemble Architecture Community.

The post Central bank digital currencies: Accelerating a digital economy with advanced technology appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The severity of cyberattacks has grown exponentially in the past decade, with nation-states and criminal organizations frequently targeting the financial services sector, sometimes to devastating effect. These threats have prompted government and industry leaders to undertake deep evaluations of cyber security practices, which in turn have generated a set of upcoming regulations that firms must now prepare for. Designed to enhance resiliency through greater transparency and cooperation across the value chain, these important regulations have significant implications for how firms manage technology and engage with regulators. 

Helping financial services businesses become more secure in a world of escalating threats is an area of special focus for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. We’re working closely with customers, governments, and stakeholders across the industry to strengthen cybersecurity technologies and practices to protect against future attacks. This is a critical responsibility, and very much in line with our commitment to making security the top priority at Microsoft, above all else.

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The impact of cyberattacks on financial services resilience 

The resilience of financial services has been strained by the evolving cyber threat landscape in recent years, as attackers have employed ever more sophisticated tools and techniques to penetrate business networks and operations.  

For example, when nation-state cyber attackers compromised the widely used SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring and management platform in 2019, they were able to operate undetected for months. By the time the breach was discovered, the damage was far reaching, with billions of dollars in economic losses and an untold espionage impact.¹ This and other incidents have prompted industry leaders and regulators to undertake a comprehensive re-evaluation of cybersecurity practices in order to identify and address key areas of improvement. One of these concerns the risk posed by third-party suppliers, in the form of what is called a “supply chain attack.” This is what happened with SolarWinds, where a trusted technology provider was exploited to send malicious code downstream to unsuspecting customers, underscoring how a successful attack on just one link of the chain can have global repercussions.  

The financial services sector, which increasingly relies on cloud computing to innovate, has sharpened its focus on mitigating these and other third-party risks with new regulatory frameworks.  

New regulations and frameworks for greater cyber resilience  

Aiming to improve cyber security and strengthen resilience overall, regulators around the world are developing guidelines that impact many financial services companies. Below are some of the most prominent ones:  

• DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act): A European Union regulation that establishes a framework designed to strengthen and harmonize risk management for financial institutions operating in the European Union. DORA goes into full force on January 17, 2025. 
• United Kingdom consultation paper 26/23: A consultation paper from the Bank of England that outlines proposed requirements for strengthening third-party risk management in the United Kingdom financial sector.  
• United States Department of the Treasury report: An assessment of cloud adoption in financial services, highlighting the importance of strengthening cybersecurity and ensuring proper provider due diligence and monitoring. 
• Financial Stability Board (FSB) toolkit: A recently published toolkit from the FSB that provides tools to manage risks associated with outsourcing and third-party service relationships to both firms and regulators around the world.  

New practices to promote more effective cybersecurity 

The changes mandated by new regulations have broad implications for financial services businesses and the technology providers who support them. Among other things, they incur new obligations around risk governance and management, incident notification, regular operational resilience testing, and pre-contractual screening for third-party service providers.  

These requirements take companies out of the on-premises mindset by which they have traditionally managed cybersecurity. Now they need to expand the horizon of the threat landscape beyond the network perimeter and consider that an attack can originate from vectors far beyond their traditional security purview. Conversely, they must assume zero trust for any entity inside or outside the perimeter—validating each user and device at every turn and providing the least amount of access required to fulfill a task. 

New cybersecurity practices are also required. For example, DORA mandates Threat-led Penetration Testing (TLPT), which involves deploying a team of ethical hackers to simulate sophisticated real-world attacks on critical systems using the tactics, techniques, and procedures of known threat actors. The findings and insights are then shared with regulatory bodies and stakeholders.  

During penetration testing, a distinction is made between testing in the cloud (for example, testing the security of resources deployed by an organization on its own tenant), and testing of the cloud (such as testing the underlying shared cloud fabric and services operated by the provider.) Our Microsoft Cloud Penetration Testing Rules of Engagement already allow customers to extensively test their security in the cloud. Testing security of the cloud is continuously done by Microsoft internal teams, as part of our third-party Pen Test and Security Assessments, and by security researchers through the Microsoft Bug Bounty Programs.  

How Microsoft further helps to enable end-to-end cyber resilience 

An important element of a highly effective cyber security strategy is to minimize the number of independent security vendors that are used by financial services firms. Having too many security suppliers makes it harder to maintain oversight, and limits the ability to correlate suspicious events. By reducing the number of vendors, firms can foster key benefits such as consolidated signal processing and faster incident reporting, which under DORA, must happen in four hours or less for critical incidents.

Fortunately, the maturation of cybersecurity technology has enabled Microsoft to build a comprehensive suite of solutions that collectively enable seamless, end-to-end enterprise cyber defense—at a level that is arguably greater than the sum of its individually excellent parts. The cornerstones for financial services include: 

• Microsoft Sentinel: A cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) system that enables real-time analysis, detection, and response to security threats—facilitating compliance with incident reporting requirements. 
• Microsoft Defender: An extended detection and response (XDR) security platform that coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and applications. 
• Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence: A platform that streamlines threat hunting, incident response, and threat intelligence analyst workflows—making it easier for security teams to neutralize cyberthreats such as ransomware.  
• Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management: A compliance solution to help detect, investigate, and act on malicious and inadvertent activities. 

These and related cybersecurity solutions are enhanced by Microsoft’s ongoing investments in ensuring that Microsoft Azure delivers a highly secure cloud foundation, with multilayered security controls and unique threat intelligence.  

Employing generative AI to advance cybersecurity in financial services 

As much as generative AI has delivered value to financial services and other industry sectors, it has also been a boon to cyber attackers. From small-scale criminal actors to nation-state organizations, AI is increasingly being employed in cyberattacks against financial services businesses.  

Among many other things, generative AI is being used to build and continuously modify malware tailored to specific vulnerabilities in financial services, create new phishing and social engineering attacks featuring fake identities and multimedia messages, and power automated attack execution.  

Fortunately, generative AI is an equally powerful tool for cyber defense. The first and most immediately effective step that firms can make is to evaluate Microsoft Copilot for Security—the first generative AI security product designed to defend businesses at machine speed and scale. It combines the most advanced GPT models from OpenAI with a Microsoft-developed security model, powered by Microsoft’s global threat intelligence and expertise. 

Designed to work seamlessly with a firm’s financial systems and the Microsoft enterprise cybersecurity suite, Copilot for Security offers numerous benefits to streamline and accelerate security operations. For example, it can help manage anomalies and threats, respond rapidly to minimize the impacts of attacks, automate time-intensive routine tasks such as creating security alerts, and much more. 

Importantly, Copilot for Security also helps solve the talent challenge by empowering analysts to become more effective threat hunters and responders without specialized technical training.  

Learn more  

Cybersecurity will only become more essential in enabling financial services innovation and success through technology. Microsoft and our global partners are ready to help every company identify and implement a modern protection strategy that will address their unique needs, today and in the years ahead.  

Here are some useful resources to help you in your cybersecurity journey: 

• To learn more about how Microsoft empowers financial services companies to achieve more, visit our website.  
• For a set of actionable steps to improve operational resilience in financial services with the Microsoft Cloud, see our earlier blog post, “6 steps to improve operational resilience in financial services with the Microsoft Cloud.” 
• To stay updated on Microsoft’s security progress, see the Microsoft Security Blog.
• To learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to the advancement of ethical AI, see the Microsoft responsible AI standard. 
• Discover more information on how Microsoft addresses threat and vulnerability management.
• To review Microsoft’s annual penetration testing reports, visit our Service Trust Portal.

¹ United States Senate RPC, The SolarWinds Cyberattack, January 29, 2021.

The post How financial services firms are strengthening cyber resilience in a new regulatory environment appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

At the heart of this transformation is our global ecosystem of partners and developers who build industry solutions on the Microsoft Cloud. Organizations are only beginning to grasp the full extent of the possibilities that lie ahead to innovate and transform with AI. Microsoft and our partners are investing in industry-specific capabilities to help customers adopt revolutionary AI solutions faster like copilot templates to create AI assistants for high value scenarios and industry data solutions that provide a data and analytics foundation to ensure your data is AI ready. 

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The age of copilots

Copilots, your everyday AI companion that assists with complex cognitive tasks, helps streamline operations, and enhances decision making, are becoming integral to almost every aspect of work and creativity. Powered by advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, copilots are impacting nearly every industry and business function, such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and agriculture.  

For example in healthcare, Stanford Medicine is deploying Nuance DAX™ Copilot, an AI assistant that automates clinical documentation such as visit summaries and care instructions, to reduce heavy administrative workloads that lead to physician burnout and expand access to personalized, high-quality care. In a preliminary survey of Stanford Health Care clinicians using DAX Copilot, 78% reported that it expedited clinical notetaking.  

In manufacturing, Volvo Group is using Microsoft Azure AI to streamline invoice and document processing in their customer service and finance departments, which had to process critical internal and customer-facing paperwork in various forms from emails to PDFs and written bills. By extracting data from images, like photographs and stamps, and translating documents to and from multiple languages, Volvo Group is saving more than 850 manual hours per month. 

These success stories are just the beginning. We are also collaborating with industry partners to bring the power of copilots to their workforce and their customers, including LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) in financial services, Bayer in agriculture, and Siemens in manufacturing.  

LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), one of the world’s leading providers of financial markets infrastructure with more than 45,000 customers in over 170 countries, is using AI to improve productivity with interoperable, secure, and compliant solutions that help optimize strategies and enable faster data-driven decisions in financial services. By integrating Microsoft Copilot capabilities into existing workflows, LSEG is working with Microsoft to build a new, interoperable solution to streamline meeting preparation for financial services professionals like investment bankers, built directly into Microsoft Teams. This solution makes it easier to discover data, summarize documents, and support investment bankers, making their customer interactions more efficient and informed. 

Additionally, LSEG is creating custom chatbots and copilots within its flagship LSEG Workspace platform that makes it easier to switch to Teams through seamless, end-to-end workflows, enabling interoperability with custom application environments to provide quick answers to financial queries. Capitalizing on AI, LSEG’s solutions will transform the financial services industry by improving productivity and accelerating value creation for customers. 

Bayer, a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of healthcare and agriculture, is piloting a unique generative AI solution for agriculture, trained by Bayer agronomists using proprietary Bayer product data. The solution aims to assist Bayer team members by providing quick and accurate answers and support to agronomy, farm management, and Bayer agricultural product-related questions. The system responds to natural language queries, generating concise, relevant information within seconds, a significant improvement over the traditional time-consuming process of information gathering and synthesizing. AI is quickly becoming an indispensable technology for the agriculture industry, with the potential to serve agronomists and benefit farmers globally. The collaboration with Microsoft as a leading technology partner is enabling exploration of ways to integrate this technology into Bayer’s digital offerings, with broad opportunities for collaboration with other agricultural offerings and partners. 

Siemens is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. Siemens’ Industrial Copilot is a generative AI-powered assistant designed to enhance human-machine collaboration and boost productivity in manufacturing, exemplifying the transformative solutions and sustainable growth potential of our global partner ecosystem. Siemens Industrial Copilot allows users to rapidly generate, optimize, and debug complex automation code, and significantly shorten simulation times from weeks to minutes. It ingests automation and process simulation information from Siemens’ open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator, and is enhanced with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.  

To find out more about solutions specific to your industry, please visit Microsoft AppSource.  

New copilot templates for retail and sustainability

In our ongoing effort to foster innovation, we are excited to introduce more ways to help you jumpstart your copilot journey. At Microsoft Build 2024, we announced new copilot templates for retail and sustainability. 

1. Store operations help retail frontline workers improve customer service and productivity by using natural language to query store operating procedures, processes, and policies on topics such as product returns. 

2. Sustainability insights enable users to easily obtain insights, facts, and data around their own company’s sustainability goals and progress. 

Available through Copilot Studio, these templates provide ready-made dialogs, intents, entities, prompts, and actions that can be easily customized and extended according to the user’s needs. 

Additionally, we will be adding industry-specific prompts to the Microsoft Copilot Lab. These new prompts will help customers quickly get started using Copilot for sector, job, and role-specific scenarios and can be customized with domain specific details, best practices, and industry context to reduce trial and error and ensure high-quality output. 

Fuel AI with industry data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

An AI-ready data estate is critical to the success of AI. Analyzing vast amounts of data, often unstructured or semi-structured, poses a significant challenge for any organization. Our industry data solutions built on top of the Microsoft Fabric platform provides a one-stop-shop for data integration, data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and business intelligence without compromising the privacy and security of your data. Data solutions in Microsoft Fabric provide a robust platform for customers and developers to manage all their data in one place, leverage a suite of analytics experiences that work together seamlessly, and apply AI to help make data driven decisions that address challenges unique to their industry. Some of these data solutions available in preview include:  

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) 

This tailored solution enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize their disparate healthcare data in a single unified store where analytics and AI workloads can operate at-scale. Leveraging the native capabilities of the platform, healthcare organizations can create connected experiences at each point of care, empower their workforce, and unlock value from clinical and operational data.  

Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) 

For retailers to truly deliver personalized experiences through generative AI for their customers, the first step is to break down data silos within their organizations and get a holistic understanding of their data estate. A unified data platform is the key to unlocking deeper, actionable insights that give retailers the ability to drive more meaningful experiences for customers. Achieving data compatibility is also a key step to getting value from AI investments, ultimately allowing retailers to optimize store operations, enhance store associates’ performance and productivity, and uncover insights for product upselling and shelf optimization. Partners like Sitecore are already connecting and building on top of the platform to further help retailers overcome data incompatibility and unlock new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Retail. 

Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview)  

The solution allows organizations to centralize and transform disparate data into standardized environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data lakes. It also enables the collection and processing of subscription and resource level emissions data. Users can connect to their data in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions to create custom environmental notebooks and build insights to better understand their carbon, water, and waste emissions. These capabilities are provided through prebuilt and preconfigured Fabric resources, that can be easily configured for your sustainability needs. 

Resources to drive innovation

To get started and learn more about our complete set of data and AI industry solutions, visit Microsoft Industry Clouds or sign-in to your account on Microsoft Cloud Solution center. 

Learn more at the Copilot learning hub, where you can discover how Microsoft Copilot can help you in your specific industry.  

Learn more about these announcements at Microsoft Build 2024

• Microsoft Build opening keynote with Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, and Rajesh Jha
• Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud
• Enabling ISVs to transform industries in the age of copilots
• Launch AI applications and get to market faster with marketplace
• Transforming the most valuable industry workflows with Copilot
• Shaping next-gen development: the future of Copilot in Power Platform
• Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next
• Build your own copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Grow your business with Copilot extensions and marketplace

¹Number of employees worldwide from 1991 to 2024, Statista.

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Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

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Today, 18 months into the 10-year partnership, we’re seeing incredible progress in bringing that joint vision to reality—with generative AI playing a pivotal role. 

As Matthew Kerner, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Cloud for Industry, noted at the Sibos 2023 conference, the partnership will ultimately evolve the customer experience at-scale across global financial markets to deliver advanced, easily accessible financial data and actionable insights through empowered workflows. 

In my previous blog post, I reviewed a set of principles that I recommend for successful AI adoption in financial services. Here, I’d like to share three essential lessons from our work with LSEG that are relevant to other financial services organizations, specifically on how to determine a good solution, strategy, and focus for AI innovations.  

Generative AI: The next phase of digital transformation  

On the day of the LSEG-Microsoft partnership announcement, barely two weeks had passed since the unveiling of ChatGPT by OpenAI. Generative AI had not yet captured the world’s imagination, although it soon would. While it may have seemed to some people to have arrived overnight, at LSEG and Microsoft it was the logical extension of technical advances that we’d been focused on for years. 

The emergence of generative AI represents the next phase of digital transformation. A central aspect of the first phase involved instrumenting operations, processes, and products across scenarios and industries to gain visibility into how things were working (or not) and organizing that telemetry into ever more sophisticated data stores to glean valuable insights. Generative AI supercharges that capability with large language models (LLMs) that go far deeper in mining data at incredible speed, and conversational interfaces that let people interact using natural language. The result is a democratization of empowerment and insights at a level not seen since the advent of the internet.  

This is good news for financial services organizations who have made bet-the-company investments on digital transformation. It means that they are well-positioned to capitalize on the foundational attributes of hyperscale cloud computing, including security, compliance, and assurance. From there, the factor that can help realize the greatest innovation with generative AI is a data strategy that ensures the right data is made available to the right LLMs, and ultimately only to the right people.  

With this broad baseline, here are three important generative AI lessons from our work with LSEG thus far.

1. Choose the right AI solution for the right problem

Generative AI is so cool that it’s tempting to try to employ the full scope of its capabilities. Resist this temptation. Focus your attention on problems that actually need solving, as opposed to searching for ways to put AI to work.  

Start with problems that burden your users—for example, laborious processes among people whose time is expensive—and work backwards. Examine the applications and environments in which people spend most of their time and consider how to optimize them. One thing we’ve learned is that integrating AI directly into existing experiences and seamlessly adding support to existing workflows is far more effective than trying to create new application destinations. If you can suddenly summarize a document in 30 seconds that previously required 10 minutes, you are certain to find value.  

In the LSEG partnership, we’re focusing on lighting up experiences within existing Microsoft investments, notably Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Fabric. Among the early highlights of this approach is a new solution in the works to streamline meeting preparation for investment bankers, built directly into Teams. 

We’re also working together to create custom chatbots and copilots within Teams to minimize switching to custom application environments, and answer questions such as, “Show me the P/E ratio of [company].” 

2. Apply your strategy for data management, tenancy, and residency 

The highly regulated nature of financial services means that system design and software architecture are uniquely complex. Different people within the same organization will often require different levels of access to key data under management, and those rules must be respected by an AI solution.  

Rather than developing new ways to handle data access and security for AI, the best approach is to build on top of existing solutions that deliver those capabilities to enact and implement the required access and regulatory controls for AI. If existing solutions are inadequate, then the key order of business is to upgrade. In other words, fix the foundations first, and then build your AI solutions upon them. 

This enables you to understand the topology of what is happening where—such as, which actions occur in which tenant (for example, LSEG customer data versus the Microsoft Graph)—while assuring comprehensive security and compliance. It will also allow you to continue your existing practices around data residency, as well as those for high-availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR). 

With LSEG, we’re focusing on innovations designed to evolve how customers gain value from their data to unlock new opportunities. This involves combining LSEG’s data and content sources in Microsoft Fabric and integrating them into the enterprise-wide data catalog and governance framework of Microsoft Purview. 

“Together with Microsoft, we are empowering our customers by increasing productivity while offering greater efficiency, resilience, and scalability across all workflows, and equipping the industry with the right tools for the next generation of financial professionals. Our multi-discipline practice of data trust is integral to LSEG’s open ecosystem for financial services, built on the foundation of transparency, security, and integrity of information. It aims to deliver rigorous data quality and governance processes, scalable technology powered by Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview, and the “responsible AI” principles.”

Satvinder Singh, Group Head of Data & Analytics at LSEG 

3. Evolve towards greater customer-centricity 

In the early stages of innovation, a common challenge is how to deal with an overabundance of interesting opportunities and ideas from a very broad set of stakeholders. With so many compelling options in front of us with AI, we realized we needed to sharpen our focus to prioritize decision-making based on potential value to the business. 

It is important to resist the temptation to “boil the ocean” by trying to solve too many problems at once. Instead, identify a handful of use case scenarios that focus on benefiting the end customer in ways that measurably impact business goals. To achieve this, our teams developed a methodology involving scoring and ranking of potential initiatives to identify the most promising options. Then we surveyed LSEG’s end customers to help us better understand their needs and inform us on their preferences.  

By combining rigorous customer discovery and a clear validation prioritization process, we were able to identify opportunities we might have otherwise missed—for example, recognizing an emerging set of personas sitting at the intersection of data and AI that we could expect to grow in value in coming years. Embracing a customer-centric approach also created a discipline to quickly test and invalidate hypotheses that would be shown to offer minimal customer value at unacceptable cost. 

Looking ahead with LSEG and Microsoft 

As we move forward in our partnership, LSEG will continue to move beyond delivering data-focused products to offering services that are built on the company’s expertise, data assets, and insights gleaned through AI. This will help solidify LSEG’s pole position in the marketplace as it delivers new solutions to drive financial stability, empower economies, and enable customers to create sustainable growth. 

For every firm, there is a profound opportunity to reimagine financial services. We are excited to continue partnering with LSEG to deliver this value to customers and the industry at large. 

Learn more 

• Discover Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. 
• Learn more about Microsoft perspectives on the era of generative AI:
  • The era of generative AI: Driving transformation in banking  
  • The era of generative AI: Driving transformation in insurance  
  • The era of generative AI: Driving transformation in capital markets  

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