Banking leaders from all over the world met last week at Microsoft Envision in Orlando, Florida, to explore the future of intelligent banking and the customer experience.

Among them were thought leaders from TD Bank, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank, who each took to the stage to deliver an inspiring look at how their organization has transformed to deliver powerful and unique customer experiences. The people at Envision 2018 also allowed me to deliver a presentation on empowering intelligent banking—including the key drivers behind the rise of smart, connected digital services.

Intelligence is key to digital transformation in the retail banking sector, not just to enable the personalized experiences today’s customers expect, but to differentiate your customer experiences in an increasingly disruptive, data-driven banking culture.

My Envision 2018 highlights

I’d like to share with you how three leading retail banks use intelligence right now to drive innovation and differentiate their customer experience in this age of dramatic change.

Intelligent financial services: Differentiate your customer experience
Speaker: Lakshmi Stockham – TD Bank

Now the sixth largest bank in North America, TD Bank placed the human experience at the center of its US expansion by empowering every employee with the tools and intelligence they need to deliver on the TD Bank brand promise of legendary service at every touchpoint.

Lakshmi Stockham, SVP for Retail Banking at TD Bank, described how the bank continues to make strides in customer-centric digital transformation. By embracing innovations like cloud services, automation, and AI-powered analytics, the bank can win new business while more traditional organizations have been held back by changing regulations.

For TD Bank, it’s crucial to retain the human touch in an increasingly automated world.

How today’s technology is transforming the client experience
Speakers: Charles Liu and Christian Kitchell – Bank of America

As they tell it, digital technology is helping Bank of America reimagine the branch experience. As customer expectations shift toward fast, connected, and always-on service, the bank is working to build ‘the financial center of the future.’

Using smart, connected technologies, Bank of America can deliver a personalized branch experience wherever its clients are. For example, if customers don’t want to leave home to consult bank staff, they can use video conferencing or engage an AI-powered service assistant like Erica.

As for its brick-and-mortar branches, Charles Liu, the bank’s Head of Branch Strategy and Transformation, is turning them into ‘client destinations,’ offering clients high-tech, high-touch services and immediate, personalized guidance from financial professionals.

Seeing a glimpse of what a financial center of the future might look like, it was easy for me to see why Bank of America remains one of North America’s leading financial innovators.

Empower digital stewardship by modernizing your workforce
Speakers: Mark Ellis and Fred Schuster – Deutsche Bank

In this inspiring talk, we learned how Deutsche Bank navigated the many challenges of a radical cloud transformation while helping ensure compliance in one of the world’s most highly regulated markets.

With a goal to empower digital stewardship with a modernized workforce by 2020, Deutsche Bank has made staggering progress. For example, by giving all its relationship managers Microsoft Surface tablets to consult with customers personally at their homes, the bank has found an ingenious way to balance strict regulation with customer expectations.

Customer needs may change day-to-day, but judging by what I’ve seen so far, Deutsche Bank will have no trouble empowering its people to deliver the intelligent, connected experiences they expect.

Join the Leaders

Are you ready to accelerate your own intelligent banking journey? It’s time to turn change into opportunity and create lifelong brand advocates with smart customer experiences. Read more in our Banking on AI e-book.

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Today, most people are indifferent to their bank and simply think of it as a utility, and it’s easy to see why. Most people have direct deposit, which means far fewer trips to the bank. In today’s increasingly cashless society, people visit ATM’s only occasionally. When banks proactively reach out, it’s typically with a generic credit card offer or something else that feels impersonal. Considering all this, it’s no wonder that nearly 80% of consumers consider their banking relationship to be merely transactional – up nearly 10% since 2014. Younger people value their banking relationship even less; in the last 12 months 20% of millennials have changed banks.

How do banks buck this trend and rebuild strong relationships with their customers? It starts with recognizing that customers are enjoying hyper-personalized experiences in other areas of their lives. They have access to curated playlists from their favorite bands as they select their custom coffee order in the Starbucks app every morning. What if banks could be personal, customer-focused, and friendly in the same way?

To delight customers, banks must change the way they engage. That involves knowing the customer and tailoring their experience using that knowledge.

With mobile and cloud technology, banks can thrive in this new era of personalized banking service and re-frame the way customers think about banking by becoming lifestyle enablers. Imagine a bank that notifies a customer who loves Beyoncé that they have exclusive ticket packages for sale. Or that informs a customer who purchases lots of movie tickets on their credit card that they are hosting an early screening of the next blockbuster in the neighborhood. That is a bank that will be more relevant to their customers and inspire more loyalty.

Transforming insight into action

Thanks to new digital solutions, banks can be more than just a savings account or a mortgage lender. Using the vast amounts of data they have about customers, they can share customized suggestions and useful offers, rather than only engage with customers through utilitarian interactions.

This opens up an entirely different type of engagement. Because banks have visibility into incomes, they can suggest neighborhoods and realtors when customers are considering home ownership. If they see repeat trips to a mechanic, they could offer a great rate on financing through a local car dealership. Because they can see purchase histories, they know when a customer might benefit from travel discounts. This is information that banks have always had access to, but they’ve never been able to use it in a consistent, unified way across the company.

Enabling personalized banking service starts with a complete view of the customer

The key to enabling personalized banking service is breaking down the barriers between divisions in the bank itself. Historically, deposits, loans, and credit cards have been tracked through a variety of systems. Once these silos are broken down, it becomes possible to present a complete view of the customer through any channel.

For example, when someone makes a call to their bank, the call center representative can now see a holistic view of all that customer’s data in a single dashboard. They know the last time the customer visited a branch, what offers they have received over email or via the website, and how many other calls they have made that week. When associates have a full view of a customer’s interactions with the bank, they are better-equipped to put each interaction into context, and to reduce friction for the customer.

More broadly, this unified view enables different departments to understand and address customer needs as a single organization, which is exactly what the customer is expecting. By bridging the barriers between channels, banks can provide customers with a consistent experience anywhere, anytime, on any device.

How Microsoft can help

This 360-degree, unified view of the customer is now possible with Microsoft cloud technology. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights is a new SaaS solution that helps employees know exactly what to do with each customer, every time. By merging all available customer data, bank employees can see a holistic view of each customer’s past interactions. From greeters to tellers to customer service reps, Customer Insights provides employees with the information they need to deliver an exceptional, personal service experience. This includes automatic suggestions that take some of the guesswork out of the process.

As a scalable cloud-based solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights is ready to implement immediately. It comes with pre-made dashboards but is flexible enough that you can create views relevant to all employees with minimal effort. The solution combines customer data from multiple systems and presents insights visually to give employees the best possible context for every customer interaction.

Built on Microsoft Azure, Customer Insights also meets a broad set of international and banking-specific compliance standards. Banks can rest assured that customer data will be secure with a solution that has received more compliance certifications than any other cloud provider to date.
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Get a first look at Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights here and start exploring how you can transform your customer relationships.

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Empower intelligent banking

Unlock new opportunities at speed through innovative business models, deliver differentiated customer experiences across channels, products and services, and redefine new ways of working.

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1. Customers need banking to be easy

It sounds straightforward, but easy banking with a great customer experience is deceptively difficult. Accessing bank products and services should be a simple, seamless experience – clean menus that don’t require countless clicks or tons of taps to access basic banking tasks. And if a customer is used to a mobile interface, they don’t want to have to relearn how to bank on a different desktop or tablet display. Digital transformation has dramatically boosted the number of interactions customers have with their bank to up to 17 interactions per month, mostly online or with a mobile device, increasing the importance of easy engagement. If a financial firm fails to make basic banking tasks simple and unified, customers will move on to a bank that does.

2. Customers need options for how they bank

Ease isn’t enough – banking customers want 24/7 access and options: on the web at home, on their phone on the go, at physical branches, and more. Today’s customers operate across both digital and physical, with 65% of customers interacting with their bank through multiple channels. Even the older, less technologically-engaged demographics that prefer in-person banking are eager to include other channels and expand their web or mobile-based interactions. Digital transformation has enabled instant gratification across multiple industries, and bank customers expect the same always-available, immediate access to banking as they do for the other digital services in their life. The difficulty with providing options and access across physical and digital comes with ensuring smooth transitions between the two. Customers want to be able to start a banking process online and not have to repeat information or tasks at a physical branch. Providing many options and a seamless, easy experience across every avenue can be challenging for banks, but it is critical to satisfying today’s customer

3. Customers need responsive customer service

Great service quality is a necessity, as customers have no reservations about switching when they receive frustratingly opaque fines and fees or their bank fails to solve their problems. Banks need to be transparent and communicate with their customers, and if issues do arise they must act quickly to painlessly resolve them on the first try. A third of banking customers report that poor customer service is the primary reason they would leave their bank. For customers who have changed banks due to bad service, over 80% said they could have been retained if their issue had been solved on their first contact with the bank. Though responsive customer service may not win banks and new customers, it is crucial to keeping existing ones.

4. Customers need to be better understood

Customers want individual attention and relevant offers from their bank, and not the usual spam of generic ads. If a customer is researching new credit cards, a targeted offer from their bank for a great deal on a card that is customized to what they are looking for saves the customer time and money. Meanwhile, an offer for a Home Equity Line of Credit rate sent to all of a bank’s customers is frustrating spam that just turns most customers off. Customers want to be understood so much that they are perfectly willing to trade personal data for tailored offerings. As more customers take advantage of digital channels, they interact with their bank more – giving banks more opportunities to better understand customer needs, to present more relevant offers at the right time and place, and ultimately to increase retention while selling additional products.

5. Customers need great value from their financial products and services

Customer loyalty program adoption is rising, but it’s not because customers are actually more loyal to their banks. One-third of banking customers participated in at least one loyalty program primarily to gain access to the “best deals.” Customers will go anywhere they can find good value, with 27% of bank customers purchasing or subscribing to a new financial product or service over the last six months—regardless if the offering came from their current provider. To compete, banks must go beyond personalization for existing customers and build great, high-value financial offerings that attract today’s savvy banking customers. Customers want convenience and value, and they are willing to exchange their personal data for good deals and discounts. Nearly half of customers want their banks to locate markdowns on purchases of interest for them, providing banks with a tremendous sales opportunity.

Clearly, consumer trends in banking point to an increased demand for tailored digital services, exceptional customer experience, and high-value products. The challenge for financial institutions is to not only cater to all five customer desires but to differentiate themselves from the competition. Exceeding across key customer needs is critical to acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones in a high-churn environment. The question for banks is, how do they provide plenty of options, remain highly responsive across every channel, offer personalized experiences to everyone, and deliver great value for customers while making it all look easy?

Introducing Customer Insights for Banking

Customer Insights for Banking, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, provides banks with a holistic, 360-degree view of customers and their needs. The solution empowers banks to modernize customer interactions by driving channel optimization, improving customer engagement, and identifying the right customers to increase profitability. Customer Insights for Banking helps financial firms differentiate themselves by enabling banks to give customers exactly what they want.

Learn more about how Microsoft is empowering intelligent banking.

_{[1] Accenture, “Banking on Value: Rewards, Robo-Advice and Relevance,” 2016
[2] Wall Street Journal, “What customers want from their banks: Ease,” 2016
[3] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[4] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[5] McKinsey & Company, “The Future of US Retail-Banking Distribution”, 2014
[6] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[7] PwC, “One step ahead: How banks can anticipate what customers will want next,” 2015
[8] Accenture, “Banking on Value: Rewards, Robo-Advice and Relevance,” 2016
[9] NGDATA, “Customers want their banks to know them better – now and into the future,” 2017
[10] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[11] NGDATA, “Customers want their banks to know them better – now and into the future,” 2017
[12] Accenture, “Banking on Value: Rewards, Robo-Advice and Relevance,” 2016
[13] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[14] Accenture, “Banking on Value: Rewards, Robo-Advice and Relevance,” 2016
[15] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[16] Accenture, “Banking Customer 2020,” 2015
[17] Accenture, “Banking on Value: Rewards, Robo-Advice and Relevance,” 2016
[18] Accenture, “Banking on Value: Rewards, Robo-Advice and Relevance,” 2016}

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“Technology is increasingly providing a competitive advantage to financial services firms looking to thrive in the digital economy,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft Corp. “Bank of America is taking a very strategic approach to cloud, looking at technology as a means to drive change and open up new business opportunities. With Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, the firm will have access to the full breadth and depth of our cloud capabilities, underscored by Microsoft’s investments in security, transparency and regulatory compliance.”

Bank of America will take advantage of the combined power of the Microsoft Cloud for business transformation. Microsoft Office 365 will provide modern, cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools to some of the bank’s 200,000 employees. The firm will also utilize Microsoft Azure, capitalizing on the scale, economics and intelligent capabilities of the platform and services.

“We are aggressively modernizing our technology infrastructure to enable current and future growth across all our lines of business,” said Howard Boville, chief technology officer at Bank of America. “Our agreement with Microsoft aligns to our target of delivering 80 percent of our technology workloads on virtual platforms within the next several years, further establishing Bank of America as a digital leader in financial services.”

Microsoft’s Financial Services Compliance program — a unique program that allows firms and regulators to deeply examine Microsoft cloud systems, services and processes — provides transparency into Microsoft cloud operations. This helps ensure Microsoft has taken the proper steps to secure data and mitigate risk. In addition, Microsoft’s industry-leading compliance portfolio assists financial institutions moving to the cloud while meeting current compliance requirements, as well as plan for future regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation.

Microsoft continues to see strong cloud adoption from the financial services industry, with more than 80 percent of the world’s largest banks and more than 75 percent of the global systemically important financial institutions using Azure. This represents the highest bar for legal, compliance, security and acquisitions teams.

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“Blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to significantly reduce the friction of doing business,” said Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Azure at Microsoft. “Microsoft is committed to bringing blockchain to the enterprise. We have listened to the needs of our customers and the blockchain community and are bringing foundational functionality with the Coco Framework. Through an innovative combination of advanced algorithms and trusted execution environments (TEEs), like Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) or Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM), we believe this takes the next step toward making blockchain ready for business.”

When integrated with a blockchain network, key benefits of the Coco Framework include these:

• Transaction speeds of more than 1,600 transactions per second
• Easily managed data confidentiality without sacrificing performance
• A comprehensive, industry-first distributed governance model for blockchain networks that establishes a network constitution and allows members to vote on all terms and conditions governing the consortium and the blockchain software system

“We are thrilled to work with Microsoft to bring blockchain to the enterprise,” said Rick Echevarria, vice president, Software and Services Group and General Manager, Platforms Security Division at Intel. “Our mutual customers are excited by the potential of blockchain. Intel is committed to accelerating the value of blockchains powered by Azure on Intel hardware, by improving the scalability, privacy and security of the solutions based on our technologies.”

The Coco Framework by design will be compatible with any ledger protocol and can operate in the cloud and on premises, on any operating system and hypervisor that supports a compatible TEE. Initial Coco Framework implementations will include R3 Corda, Intel Sawtooth Lake, J.P. Morgan Quorum and Ethereum.

“The R3 Corda platform was built for enterprises. We designed it with the financial industry from the ground up to solve real business problems, but we also knew it had to be deployable and manageable in today’s complex IT landscape,” said David E. Rutter, CEO of R3. “No other distributed ledger technology platform is as interoperable or easily integrated, and partnering with Microsoft is another milestone in our mission to facilitate a world of frictionless commerce.”

A technical white paper and demonstration are available today for business leaders and developers looking to learn more about the Coco Framework. Microsoft will launch the framework on GitHub in 2018 as an open source project and will work with customers and partners, as well as the blockchain technical and business communities, to continue advancing foundational blockchain technology.

More information on the Coco Framework, including links to our technical white paper and technical demo, can be found at http://www.aka.ms/cocoframework.

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In order to do that at scale, banks need a solution that models their entire portfolio and changes the paradigm for inbound customer engagements. Below are two use-cases illustrating how a next best action (NBA) solution enhances interactions for both customers and banks.

Improve customer engagement and targeting

Consider a bank promoting a new refinancing offer on existing home mortgages. When a homeowner calls the bank for any reason, a next best conversation notifies the agent who answers that the customer is eligible to refinance under the new promotion. The agent addresses the customer’s original reason for calling the bank, then positions the refinancing option’s benefits to the customer based on their personal information. Instead of an impersonal email, next best conversation turns every inbound activity into an opportunity to reinforce the bank’s personalized service and reach customers with targeted offers.

Next best action solutions trigger all kinds of customer-oriented alerts that assist with service personalization – including notifications that help with real-time retention. Say that a customer is about to transfer a large amount of money out of their account online or through their phone app. Large transfers usually indicate that customers are switching banks, and customer churn quickly adds up –  $30 billion in revenue is at risk for US banks due to customer attrition over the next year.[i] Before the customer hits “complete” on the transfer, a next best conversation system can automatically trigger a targeted retention offer. By offering customers a real-time offer such as a better interest rate, banks have an opportunity to change the customer’s mind before it’s too late. These triggered offers enable banks to solve for customer pain points in real time, delivering new levels of personalization while expanding hardly any additional resources.

Flag and resolve regulatory compliance issues in the context of customer interactions

With a next best conversation system that enables inbound targeting, banks are also empowered to be more proactive about compliance. Once a regulation is built into the data model, the solution can automatically flag and target compliance gaps. With this automatic flagging, corporate relationship managers no longer need to spend time manually tracking gaps across hundreds of accounts. The next time a customer interacts with the bank through an app, phone call, or in-person, the next best action solution ensures that whoever is engaging with that client knows to ask for the missing compliance information. Of course, if a customer declines to get the necessary information to the agent in the moment, a next best conversation solution can always follow up with an automated outbound communication.

Enhance your inbound channels today

VeriPark’s Next Best Action solution enables banks to easily handle the above scenarios, arming employees with the next best conversation for every inbound customer. Built on Microsoft Cloud Technology, Next Best Action empowers contact center agents, bank branch employees, and relationship managers with the tools they need to make the most of every interaction. Whether it’s satisfying compliance requirements, cross-selling or up-selling, or just solving a quick problem, every bank employee now has the entire portfolio at their fingertips and the ability to engage customers along their preferred channel. A large European bank leveraged VeriPark’s Next Best Action to much success; selling 25,000 new SME loans to 400,000 identified prospects.

Try VeriPark’s Next Best Action solution for yourself on Microsoft AppSource today.

Learn more by visiting the Next Best Action solution page.

[i] https://thefinancialbrand.com/55748/banking-consumers-attrition-loyalty-study/

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Merrill Corporation is a provider of secure content sharing services for regulatory disclosures, critical financial documents, and custom and compliant communications. Today they have 4,700 employees across 34 locations worldwide. Their digital transformation began in the latter half of 2015, and while it appears to have happened quickly, from within the walls of the company there were challenges that made the company stronger and more resilient than ever.

This is a real story of digital transformation.

Transformation to a Unified Process

As a service-oriented company, Merrill Corp. has made dozens of solution upgrades over its half-century of business: phones to faxes, mail to email, Internet to the cloud. The latest technology advances have once again allowed Merrill Corp. to take advantage of opportunities in the market and improve capabilities, and all the while, during this period of transformation, Merrill maintained focus on its customer-centric approach, and relied on their incredible customer service to keep them on the map through their period of growth and development.

As a company handling financial documents — both digital and print –Merrill had previously managed its business units independently, each with its own siloed needs and solutions, marketing tactics and business strategies. Because of the fragmented structure, a single document could often be stored in four different repositories within Merrill alone. Different technology stacks leveraged competing solutions within the same company and a heavy infrastructure made it difficult to optimize performance and reliability. Externally, Merrill wasn’t presenting itself as a unified company, so customers didn’t understand its full set of capabilities.

Ultimately, understanding priorities and being able to break away from traditional SLA turn-around times was critical to their success. Because of the evolving nature of architectures and designs, by the time Merrill got to a request, there might be new information that effectively changed the request or could potentially make it obsolete.

“Back then, the risk was “how well can I respond at 2 am when I’ve been woken up by the pager?” explains Eric Schroeder, Director of Cloud Infrastructure.Changing Perceptions

With all of these pain points, Merrill had the foresight and vision to know that they would need to make some big changes to stay competitive in the fierce financial services market of the future. Last year, the company relaunched their brand, tying all the groups together under the “Merrill Corporation” identity. The company effectively transformed itself from a waterfall environment to an agile environment, and as a result, the rate of growth has been tremendous. For Merrill, the journey has meant new talent, new process, new technologies and a new way of thinking.Creating a customer-driven process

While the new organization is technology based, it remains also heavily customer-focused, viewing every customer’s need with a different lens. A law firm partner might have piles and piles of paper, where a junior associate only has a laptop. Millennials are typically more comfortable with technology, while buyers tend to be more comfortable with traditional workflow processes.

Chief Product Officer, Thomas Fredell explains, “What we found over time is that the needs of our customers have really shifted away from the traditional printing much more towards electronic mechanisms that allow them to communicate together more effectively, to share information in a secure way, and to get their most sensitive transactions – their most sensitive regulatory information – distributed communication done. Our identity has been changing.”

Merrill has embraced a fundamental shift in thinking that allows the company to use back-end research tools without losing the warmth of human interactions. Throughout its development processes, Merrill also uses quantitative and qualitative research that includes one-on-one and team interviews, online usability sessions, and real-time observations. In a single year alone, Merrill conducted more than 680 individual research sessions with customers, 85% of which were face-to-face. This was a dramatic increase from the 45 sessions per year it had conducted previously. Because of this customer-driven product methodology, Merrill has gained a more comprehensive understanding of its ecosystem, use cases, opportunities, solutions, and above all, their customer needs.

Because of this high level of engagement, the company can put out a product, have its customers use it, and then provide feedback about the problems they’re solving. Engineers then make changes based on that feedback and reintroduce it, redesigned based on their experiences. As such, he desire to deliver the best customer experience is what drives their processes.

“We want to be a utility for our customers—something they don’t think about, says Head of Global Product Management, Christian Idiodi. Everything we do supports a business process: raising money, buying or selling a company… Making it easy to use is foundational to our vision.”Harnessing the Power of a Single Platform

The team at Merrill is seeing results, without a doubt. When they first began using the cloud in early 2016, it wasn’t necessarily a ‘transformation.’ They simply took an application that had been running in an on-premises stack and got it working in Azure. That process took about three months, but it allowed them to break into a new market. Once this initial step was taken, there was no stopping Merrill on its journey of digital transformation. “The collaborative technologies have allowed us to bring a total solution to our customer, rather than just one end point or one off solutions,” describes Chief Operating Officer, Rod Johnson.

With Azure, Merrill Corp. can now harness the power of a single platform to support the lifecycle of a financial document, and about 5,000 mergers and acquisitions transactions every year. That includes compliance and financial documents that require highly specialized care and attention. It’s the reason they are creating a secure repository. Christian explains its design as the difference between a filing cabinet and a safe. “You’ve got filing cabinets, but you need a safe for your passports and most sensitive documents.” Merrill’s goal is to create a more flexible way for their customers to reorganize their safe, in a sense.

Understanding the processes their customers use every day to raise capital has been key for Merrill’s product team. Every product brought to market has been validated early and often throughout the process.

The biggest difference between Azure and other cloud platforms is in its platform as a service (PaaS) features. “We’ll look back in a year, and think about how slow things are now,” Schroeder says. Merrill already runs 20 times faster than they did just eight months ago. “When I hear people talk about cloud just being somebody else’s datacenter I think they’re missing the point, or they’re working with the wrong partner, he explains. “They’re missing the boat. And ‘the boat’ in transformation is the ability to truly respond to your customers quickly and try something new and let it fail quickly without having invested a whole lot in it.”

Although Merrill still uses the IaaS features of Azure, its process is completely different than it was eight months ago. With the old legacy systems, they pushed out code every five weeks. At present, new code is released daily.

“We are introducing new tools in how we work, communicate, and collaborate,” says Christian. “We’ve gone from a traditional financial printer model to really this metamorphosis into a platform company.”

Johnson agrees, “In the past, our job was basically to process documents. Today, with the collaborative technologies that we have, we can bring our expertise and our knowledge to the table and help our customers in a way that is much more valuable than just processing documents for them. We can consult with them, we can advise them, and, using the technology, they can be much more efficient in the way they get their work done.”
Leveraging Partnerships for Greater Problem Solving

Role-based access control, and other things Azure is doing and what others have built on Azure to solve problems have undoubtedly helped to accelerate Merrill’s road map. Tapping into the technology, security, and expertise of its partners to solve problems opens Merrill Corp. up to a larger ecosystem and allows other companies to leverage its platform to solve their own problems, too.

Further, Merrill itself changed how it works. New partnerships were formed within the company, and a new way to communicate and drive requests back and forth emerged. It changed the workflow almost entirely.  “We used to have silos of information that were created and recreated and recreated again, and now, with some of the collaborative tools of digital transformation, we can share data together; we can collaborate on data in a way that wasn’t possible,” Johnson says. His team works closely with other teams in product development, project management and security, all of which actively participate in planning meetings.

These changes are indicators of the massive culture shift that has taken place within the walls of Merrill Corporation. Eric Schroeder’s team scrapped the service catalog, and now everyone uses the same tools for workflow and works in the same sprint cadence. His risk assessment has changed from worrying whether he’ll have the answer at 2 a.m., to ensuring he’s done his due diligence, and whether the new tech is filling a warranted change. According to Schroeder, the most significant difference in how Merrill Corp. worked in the past and where they’re headed is that as a whole it’s changed its thinking from “What can Merrill do?” to “What does Microsoft have that we can leverage?”

It’s a mindset on which the leadership team philosophically aligns. “We use a lot of tools for our customers to consume as a part of our service,” Chief Technology Officer, Brad Smuland says. “That’s based on Microsoft. Part of what we offer is Word and Excel-based products, and there’s a natural ability to take those desktop environments and connect them to the cloud-base site and really have a well-oiled ecosystem.”

From lawyers, bankers, and investors to enterprise corporations, Merrill’s customers create documents, collaborate on them, review, make changes, manage approvals, and then file or distribute those documents. Working within Office 365, and collaborating online allows the company to quickly provide tremendous value without disrupting the tools and the comfort they have with Microsoft.
Looking to the Future

The leadership team at Merrill recognizes that the pace of innovation is accelerating, and acknowledges that speed and agility are key to their company’s future. Things people only imagined—machine learning, data science—are becoming more common. To win and be different, Merrill’s leadership team realizes that they need an ostensible platform that is open and flexible enough to provide value. Forward vision can’t be focused too much on the technology, but instead must be crafted around capabilities, knowing that the underlying systems can change.

Their key priorities now are bringing in the right talent, approaching and solving problems in the right way, and partnering with others who can provide a competitive advantage. Merrill Corp’s leadership team has been very transparent about its overall vision, rolling out company-wide demos of all releases, and engaging with the entire organization. “There are so many things that Microsoft does that we can leverage, so that we can focus on what we do best,” says Christian.

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The view from the headquarters of AIA Group, located in one of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscrapers, is spectacular—literally and figuratively. Since its successful IPO in 2010, AIA has been in transformation mode, focused on introducing customers to a new way of working that matches their expectations for efficient service. The company has also launched new mobile apps, aimed to help consumers improve their health.

“The insurance industry in Asia is a great place to be,” says Sim Preston, Group Chief Operations Officer at AIA Group. “Overall population growth, a rising middle income, and a strong family ethic are all beneficial to our business—providing long-term protection, savings, and products to families across Asia Pacific.”

However, instead of sitting back and enjoying its prospects, AIA is investing in technology solutions such as Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365 to help empower the business. AIA is improving the speed and agility of some of its systems by hosting them in the Azure cloud computing environment. Office 365 cloud-based business services support a new modern workplace that helps drive connected teamwork among employees and AIA partners to boost customer service.

“We’re reorienting from a distribution focus toward revolutionizing customer experience,” says Preston. “For example, through our Accelerator program, we work with startups to learn about the latest trends in digital health and may incorporate them into our products and services. To drive productive collaboration with these companies, we decided to use Office 365.”

“Office 365 amplifies our competitive strengths through a workplace transformation that empowers employees. Connected teamwork across 18 Asian markets drives efficiency and caring customer service.” Sim Preston AIA Group Group Chief Operations Officer

Improves productivity, raises knowledge capital

AIA conducts business in 18 markets across Asia Pacific. “We want to collaborate better across this multicultural scenario, empowering local employees to access the information they need to serve customers in different markets. At the same time, we must strive for operational efficiencies,” says Bob Crozier, Social Network Lead for AIA Group. “Today, we use Office 365 to work more effectively across all the markets we serve. For example, I’m a lot more productive using Delve to quickly find the emails and information I’m working on, organized around my interests, colleagues, and projects.” Delve, part of Office 365, sends users personalized information based on what they’re working on and what’s trending around them.

The company worked with Microsoft Services Consulting to migrate to Office 365. “Microsoft Consulting Services provided the technical support, expertise, and assistance that we needed, which was a real advantage to us,” says Andrew Anker, Head of Infrastructure Services and Technology Risk at AIA Group. “They were very committed to making sure we got the best out of the product set.”

After launching Office 365, more than 2,300 groups and 14,000 employees began using the company’s social network, dubbed “Wave,” to share ideas and best practices. “Microsoft Services also provided excellent support for a successful Yammer launch. We migrated more than 300 gigabytes of content from Jive, our previous solution, in fewer than 10 weeks,” says Crozier. “The language translation capability in Yammer is fantastic. Our employees no longer miss the nuances in a conversation because of language barriers, which improves the quality of information and ideas that we exchange.”

Today, team members use Yammer to announce enhancements to the company actuarial software and share best practices with their colleagues, raising the overall knowledge capital of the company. And onboarding the yearly influx of actuarial interns is a much smoother process now that they use Wave to get answers and ramp up quickly—a win for the interns and AIA in terms of immediate productivity gains. Marketing teams in different countries spark new ideas by showcasing their best campaigns on Microsoft SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. And the PR and marketing teams use Skype for Business Online meetings to broadcast product-launch details to marketing managers in various markets across Asia.

“Having the ability to send someone a link they can use to join a meeting is pretty slick. I can share my screen to present with PowerPoint and quickly invite others to join the call,” says Crozier. “Traditionally, collaborating among 18 markets required travel in order to get everyone on the same page, but now it can happen at the drop of a hat. Office 365 is changing our cultural work experience, not to mention saving us time.”

Fosters teamwork and creativity

For AIA, the link between collaboration and innovation is a key business benefit of Office 365. The company is staying ahead of industry trends, brainstorming new product ideas, and streamlining business processes. Recently, AIA employees used Wave to exchange ideas on the company’s new science-backed wellness program—AIA Vitality. They provided immediate feedback so the product team could enhance features before launch.

“This was a multifaceted success story,” says Crozier. “People got to know each other better and now work more productively as a team. Employees posted blogs internally and on social media to drive brand awareness externally. And we now have a new process for future product development.”

Boosts mobility, customer service

Today, AIA employees are empowered to work efficiently when and where they choose. Thanks to Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, AIA employees can download Office on up to 15 devices of their choice, with more secure, mobile access to their applications, documents, and settings. “On the road, I hook up to my phone’s hotspot and go through my emails, forward documents to colleagues, and respond to my notifications on Yammer,” says Crozier. “I travel all through Asia with my phone and my iPad and work as productively as if I’m sitting in my office. The entire AIA leadership team does the same.”

The legal team can quickly access important corporate documents stored on SharePoint Online. And members of the marketing team regularly view and edit documents accessed from SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business to quickly sign off on marketing campaigns, even if team members are out of the office.

AIA is also enhancing mobility for employees who can be at the right place at the right time to attend to customers. “We are The Real Life Company and Office 365 helps us deliver on that promise,” says Preston. ”The more efficiently we can work on the road, the more we can help our customers with immediate, personal attention.”

Now that a mobile-first focus permeates the company, AIA is attracting top talent who expect the flexibility of cloud-based computing. “With Office 365, we have enhanced all work environments—in the office on a desktop, at the airport on a laptop, or in a taxi on a mobile device—through a consistent experience across all devices,” says Anker. “And the interoperable programs are so intuitive that they require little to no training, boosting adoption and productivity.“

Simplifies IT, security

AIA is enjoying all the benefits of its cloud-based business productivity solution with built-in security and continuous compliance, while simplifying in-house IT functions. “Information security is of paramount importance to every financial institution,” says Preston. “We appreciate the transparency of Office 365,” adds Anker. “Security features like Rights Management Services in Microsoft Exchange Online and the data loss protection components of the solution made us comfortable.”

It’s only been 14 months since AIA subscribed to Office 365, however, significant changes to the workplace have already enhanced the company’s future road map. “Office 365 amplifies our competitive strengths through a workplace transformation that empowers employees,” concludes Preston. “Connected teamwork across 18 Asian markets drives efficiency and caring customer service. We’re looking forward to building more business based on these improvements.”

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