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Microsoft Industry Reference Architecture for Banking (MIRA-B)

The banking industry is experiencing unprecedented change with some even questioning whether it is possible to effectively serve customers, meet new regulatory requirements, and create innovative new business models while sustaining profitability. It is safe to say that with increasing Tier 1 capital requirements, declining margins, and increasing operational costs, the economics of the banking industry must change. The Microsoft Industry Reference Architecture for Banking (MIRA-B) is a technology reference architecture, based on Microsoft’s platform and services, that is designed to help financial institutions reduce costs and drive strategic growth.

MIRA-B, a development and delivery framework that provides clarity on technical capabilities and implementation approaches to support enterprise IT architecture planning, helps financial institutions modularize and align business and technology assets in a predictable way. MIRA-B outlines a roadmap for the future that provides the architectural flexibility to deliver industry solutions on-premise or in the cloud. As a result, this supports new business models, profit streams and customer experiences that enable financial institutions to leverage technology as a means of being present in the lives of their customers any time, any place, across channels and devices.

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help financial institutions address industry challenges and opportunities by providing a comprehensive range of mission-critical IT solutions and capabilities which span front to back office, device to datacenter, on-premise and cloud. These capabilities include highly scalable server and client infrastructure, secure data and application platforms, Big Data and predictive customer analytics, ultra-low latency OS-level support, productivity, CRM/xRM, workflow and collaboration, as well as the connected user experience.

For more information on how to realize benefits from MIRA-B, please download the whitepaper or contact us at mira-b@microsoft.com.

Mission Critical
Data Tier
Application Tier & End User Experience
Private Cloud Infrastructure

MIRA-B has been endorsed by leading Microsoft technology partners and customers. Click on the following logo's to hear their views on MIRA-B.

View All partners and customers

Banking Industry Architecture Network

"Having Microsoft as a founding and active member of BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) is extremely powerful for our community as Microsoft’s reach in the banking industry is vast. Using BIAN’s semantic business models gives Microsoft an ‘off-the-shelf’ blueprint for the company’s MIRA-B framework. As the BIAN Service Landscape is completely integrated into Microsoft’s reference models, the two standards are aligned, which provides a clear framework for the industry as a whole. It’s my strong belief that the MIRA-B framework will act as a catalyst for banks that are embarking on their journey of IT modernization and cost reduction through a service oriented architecture." -Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director, BIAN

FinArch

"FinArch made an informed decision to base its applications on the Microsoft platform 15 years ago. Not only has this paid off tremendously for FinArch in term of supporting the growth of the company and our solution suite, but our customers are reaping the benefits of an open, integrated, scalable, complete and affordable platform. Microsoft provides a first class architecture for the financial services industry and customers that implement it see real return on their investment." -Nigel Lee, Chief Commercial Officer, FinArch

Fiserv

"We see key benefits from the Microsoft Industry Reference Architecture for Banking (MIRA-B) to enable enhanced process efficiency. Fiserv provides complementary, configurable platforms for automating critical processes. Our focus is on optimizing the customer experience as we bring the digital transformation of financial services to more than 16,000 clients worldwide. Our continued partnership with Microsoft aids us in enabling our clients to drive profitability and growth through sustainable innovation." -John Macaluso, Senior Vice President, Technology Strategy, Bank Solutions, Fiserv Inc.

Misys

"The MIRA-B initiative is comprehensive and helps confront the increasingly complex business demands of the banking industry while providing a flexible framework to streamline and accelerate the delivery of banking solutions." -Robin Crewe, CTO, Misys plc

NewOak Capital Advisors

"NewOak Capital has been working collaboratively with multidisciplinary groups coordinating through the Microsoft Office of CTO to define the next-generation open and scalable metamodel for ongoing enterprise transparency, risk management and process-flow management across a variety of key banking business lines and functions. We have found the Microsoft team to be highly resourceful and strategic in their thinking, valuing the importance of a full understanding of complex banking domain requirements under a tight multijurisdictional regulatory environment." - Ron D’Vari, CEO & Co-Founder, NewOak Capital Advisors

SunGard

"Working closely with the Microsoft team, SunGard continues to enhance the capabilities of its IntelliMatch solution suite in order to meet the reconciliation needs of banks globally. Leveraging continuous development of the Microsoft Industry Reference Architecture for Banking, SunGard is able to deliver new functionality that enables our customers to deploy scalable enterprise centers of excellence for reconciliation, and achieve significant operational gains cost effectively." -Jennifer Hanes EVP, Reconciliations, SunGard

"Customers of our Front Arena trading & risk management solution are evolving their businesses in volatile capital markets where performance, speed and cost are all critical competitive differentiators. By delivering Front Arena on Microsoft’s powerful SQL Server technology, we’re able to offer a low-latency, cost-efficient yet high-performance trading solution that can easily scale and adapt to meet customer needs. In addition, with Microsoft’s MIRA-B, we believe we have a common architectural framework that can help us to accelerate the delivery of this solution." -Peter Banham Head of Strategy, Capital Markets, SunGard

Temenos

"Microsoft has had indisputable success in bringing excellent, efficient and highly cost-effective software solutions to a wide variety of markets and technologies. Their focus on the banking market, including their support for standardization initiatives such as BIAN, is to be enthusiastically welcomed by those in our industry who want to see proven and effective products help solve the challenges that our industry faces. The MIRA-B framework is a clear statement of Microsoft’s intent and ability to do this, and we at Temenos look forward to continuing our close partnership and helping realize the benefits inherent in this vision for our clients and for the wider banking industry." -Mark Gunning, Global Director, Business Solutions, Temenos

UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions

"Building sustainable banking architectures continues to be a key issue as financial institutions strive to align their business goals and technical capabilities,” said Alberto Alessi, Head of Strategy Unit, UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions. “The success of UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions’ approach suggests that standardized components, architecture design and cloud computing must be emphasized to meet our business imperatives. Given that MIRA-B shares these attributes, we expect it will be a valuable asset in defining future capabilities for banking and other large ecosystems." - Alberto Alessi Head of Strategy Unit, Strategy Management Department, UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions

Banking Solutions

View all banking imperatives

Advisory Services

Branch

Business Intelligence in Financial Services

Core Banking

Documents & Records Compliance

Online and Mobile Financial Services

Payments and Financial Messaging for Banking

Risk Management & Analytics

Advisory Services

Microsoft provides an easily customizable, scalable platform that can integrate with existing systems to empower advisors with real-time access to integrated client and industry data, along with applications required to identify profitable customers, provide superior financial advice and execute on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Branch

Microsoft branch solutions are based on the world’s most connected software to help financial institutions improve the customer experience, deliver cross-channel consistency, enable employees to improve the customer relationship and radically reduce operational costs.

Business Intelligence in Financial Services

Microsoft supports financial institutions with a platform to deliver break-through insight into business performance, customer profitability and an integrated view of enterprise-wide risk exposure. The Microsoft business intelligence solution puts information into the hands of authorized bank employees who need it to improve the bank's competitive advantage, the trader looking to develop new portfolio strategies, and the underwriter evaluating a pricing optimization to increase their returns.

Core Banking

Microsoft core banking solution enables integrated back office systems for retail, corporate or private banking operations - supporting functionality for current and savings accounts, term deposits, personal, mortgage, and commercial lending, trade finance, and reconciliations. The solution provides essential integration to other critical aspects of the bank such as branch banking, customer insight, advisor services, payments, and risk management.

Documents & Records Compliance

Microsoft document and records compliance solutions enable organizations to rationalize and simplify the management of documents and records retention policies to ease the compliance burden for employees. Microsoft solutions incorporate native compliance and retention features, records repository and search functionality, managed folder provisioning, transport rules, and journaling.

Online and Mobile Financial Services

Microsoft supports financial institutions in developing new business models and customer experiences by enabling the institution to be present in the lives of their customers any time, any place, across any channel or device. Microsoft enables financial institutions to deliver a contextual experience to customers with cross-platform development tools to consolidate the delivery of products and services across multiple devices.

Payments and Financial Messaging for Banking

Microsoft and our technology partners provide payments and messaging solutions in the following areas:

Payment Channels and Mobile Payments: Whether for retail or wholesale banking, Microsoft and its partners’ solutions are designed to deliver a more innovative payments experience that strengthens the customer relationship.
Payment Operations: Microsoft partners provide solutions for payment hub operations and the necessary application to application integration frameworks.
Financial Messaging: Solutions from Microsoft and our partners address the automation and reconciliation of financial transactions, enabling end-to-end straight-through processing of payments between banks and with their corporate customers.

Risk Management & Analytics

Microsoft’s approach to risk analytics ensures solutions are pervasive in employees' everyday activities, with tools that are seamlessly integrated into existing applications and systems to provide value through:

Risk management process, workflows, and controls addressing assessment of risk, collection of key risk indicators and building an enterprise-wide repository
Risk computing and modeling solutions to reduce the time needed to compute real-time risk exposures
Easy-to-use risk visualization and reporting tools that integrate with existing data warehouses
Consolidated view of the risk management exposures combined with corporate performance management