Microsoft runs on trust. This includes ensuring that the company is compliant with regulatory requirements by utilizing evolving technology to transform compliance practices, including trade screening.
At Microsoft, we pride ourselves on working fairly and honestly with the people we do business with. The increasing use of online commerce, however, has made trade screening more complicated and we’ve had to work hard to maintain compliance and increase efficiency.
—Joseph Hindo, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital
Microsoft Trade and Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) teams, in partnership with Microsoft Digital and SAP, worked together to deploy a reliable and scalable compliance management solution that combines the rich feature sets of SAP Business Integrity Screening (BIS), the processing power of S/4 HANA databases, and the scalability and agility of Microsoft Azure.
SAP BIS trade screening is one aspect of the company’s larger Trade Screening Transformation (TST) program, which ensures Microsoft compliance with embargoes, sanctions, and denied party regulations. As part of the transformation, SAP BIS helps Microsoft trade screen with more speed and efficiency.
“At Microsoft, we pride ourselves on working fairly and honestly with the people we do business with,” says Joseph Hindo, a principal software engineering manager with Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft. “The increasing use of online commerce, however, has made trade screening more complicated and we’ve had to work hard to maintain compliance and increase efficiency.”
To combat that, the company has launched its new Microsoft Azure-based screening tool.
How does it work?
As part of Microsoft’s TST program, the tool screens all parties that seek to do business with Microsoft. It does so quickly and accurately despite having to sift through massive amounts of data in ways that comply with laws and regulations that vary by country and region.
We wanted to have a system so that when an account is created and the user clicks ‘save,’ the customer is screened in real time. In half a second, we now can screen a customer’s name and other details and provide an immediate response as to whether or not business with Microsoft is allowed.
—Antti Lamberg, senior program manager, Microsoft Digital
With Microsoft Azure and the HANA database, SAP BIS Trade Screening runs under the hood of several sales channels, flagging potential problems within milliseconds of a customer interaction taking place, and reducing potential business bottlenecks. Not only does TST help Microsoft solve a major business challenge and meet regulatory requirements, its deployment of SAP BIS S/4 HANA might soon be the largest in the world to date.
[Learn how Microsoft examines SAP transactions with Azure Anomaly Detector. Find out how Microsoft optimizes SAP for Azure.]
A fast deployment
Building a new trade screening tool happened in just five months, from the first proof of concept meetings in November 2019, to a go-live in April 2020.
Microsoft has long worked to enforce fair trade practices. For several years, it has used multiple trade screening systems to look for questionable transactions or entities. But each had its own gaps and challenges. The TST system gives Microsoft the opportunity to improve customer experiences through faster detection, using the power of predictive decision-making and integration with other SAP and non-SAP systems, which reduces the time to market for global expansion and creating new customer records.
“We wanted to have a system so that when an account is created and the user clicks ‘save,’ the customer is screened in real time,” says Antti Lamberg, a senior program manager with Microsoft Digital. “In half a second, we now can screen a customer’s name and other details and provide an immediate response as to whether or not business with Microsoft is allowed.”
Now, Microsoft screens companies and individuals with whom the company does business at the time of record creation or updates, no longer needing to screen a customer’s multiple separate transactions in a given day for a sales channel.
It’s really, really fast
What is perhaps most impressive about the SAP BIS Trade Screening tool is that it’s blazing fast—as Lamberg notes, it needs less than 500 milliseconds to identify potential trade blocks. And that can involve some millions of records processing 24/7/365.
“That was a tough one,” says Jasmit Kohli, a senior software engineer and SAP expert with Microsoft. “That would be four-nine performance, meaning 99.99 percent delivery against a target metric. We had to think outside of posting on a single system. We’re implementing an active-active node structure so if one node is down, it can route the call to a second node. That way, the availability is always there.”
Azure is a beautiful product in terms of building solutions at scale. It offered the services and robust infrastructure that allowed us to build a high-performance system. It was fascinating to leverage the standard Azure service offerings to meet different business use-cases.
—Jasmit Kohli, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital
Steps engineers took to reach this goal included determining the cost of every millisecond saved, finding opportunities without compromising security or compliance. They applied best practices for caching, concurrent processing, and other aspects to get consistently fast results. And they ensured that each component of SAP BIS Trade Screening had rich telemetry for good insight into how the tool is performing.
Microsoft Azure was an important tool for making the SAP S/4 HANA database work well.
“Azure is a beautiful product in terms of building solutions at scale,” Kohli says. “It offered the services and robust infrastructure that allowed us to build a high-performance system. It was fascinating to leverage the standard Azure service offerings to meet different business use-cases.”
A big team effort
The team working on SAP BIS trade screening had several challenges, not least of which was the tight deadline. Another big task was to connect SAP S/4 HANA to Microsoft Azure and integrate it into Microsoft sales workflows without excessive customization. The third was a challenge now familiar to nearly everyone in COVID backdrop: working as a remote and distributed team with several global development teams, including SAP in Germany and Microsoft teams in the US and India.
“We talked and brainstormed quite a bit,” Hindo says. “We flew to Germany to meet with SAP and learn more from them about their capabilities, and how those would fit into how we would screen business data.”
All told, some 30 teams worked on the SAP BIS Trade Screening tool, with more than 100 people working on the engineering, and many others on the business side.
“I really enjoyed the way the team worked together,” Hindo says. “It was a great collaborative effort between the teams around the world to get this thing across the finish line.”
With the basic architecture of SAP BIS Trade Screening now in place, Lamberg says the engineering work on the product has focused on future-proofing the technology. In addition to unifying data today, the trade screening tool is designed to accept additional AI capabilities, integrate with future Microsoft Azure components, and work with language detection. For the latter, the SAP BIS Trade Screening tool could identify different languages and send the system’s report to a specialist in that language.
“We upgraded a new version of the tool in February, and we upgraded S/4 HANA at the same time,” Lamberg says. “And then we heard from SAP that we were the first company worldwide to actually do that. We were happy about that.”
To ensure Microsoft Runs on Trust, Microsoft’s Azure-based SAP BIS trade screening tool is a powerful component of the trade screening compliance program.
