Financial Services: Customer Stories

The insurance industry’s standards-setting body, ACORD, needed a standard way for employees and members to communicate. It needed to cut costs and boost productivity among its global membership. Its new unified communications platform uses Microsoft® technologies that cost up to 80 percent less than alternatives, yet enable users to move seamlessly among document management; instant messaging; telephony; and voice, video, and Web conferencing.

Leading insurer Allianz Belgium wanted to improve its distribution relationship management with the brokers who sell its insurance products while boosting the quality of information and reducing costs. The firm replaced its outdated broker database for customer relationship management with an integrated application using Microsoft Dynamics® CRM software. As a result, Allianz Belgium is improving sales and providing a better service to brokers.

Allianz Brasil Seguros, the Brazilian subsidiary of the Allianz Group, wanted to improve the productivity of its insurance sales team and give it access to information about brokers in the field. The company deployed Microsoft Dynamics® CRM for 400 employees—half of whom work remotely. Managers now have better strategic and day-to-day control over the sales team, which, in turn, has detected more new business opportunities and improved customer service.

AXA Seguros, part of AXA Group, is an insurance company that strives to deliver superior customer service, which is critical for success in this industry. The company is replacing an inefficient, manual, claims-management system with one based on the Windows Azure platform. AXA Seguros experienced simplified development and deployment, was able to focus its efforts on business logic rather than technology, and avoided capital expenses.

Bank of America, one of the world’s leading financial institutions, provides its services through 6,100 retail banking offices and nearly 18,500 ATMs. For a large and complex organization like Bank of America, compliance with the numerous U.S. and international financial regulations is of vital importance. One of the most significant of those regulations is the Basel II Accord, which establishes rigorous requirements designed to ensure that banks hold capital reserves appropriate to the risk to which they are exposed. To comply with the operational risk aspects of Basel II, the bank created a portal solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Developed and deployed in just four months, the solution has been rapidly adopted by managers and staff, who are using it to comply with Basel II and to better measure and address operational risk throughout the enterprise.

BMO Capital Markets is a leading, full-service financial services provider, with more than 2,000 employees. The firm offers corporate, institutional, and government customers access to a complete range of investment and corporate banking products and services. BMO Capital Markets required more powerful computing resources to analyze the growing volume of financial data and ensure that its financial traders could process transactions more effectively. Today, the firm is using Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. The end-to-end high-performance computing (HPC) platform enables the firm to ensure that computing power can be made available to any part of the firm that needs it. The company is using the HPC solution to better analyze the growing volume of financial data, calculate the financial exposure, and speed up the process of providing credit risk calculations to the business.

BNZ wanted to find a better way to analyze monthly data that is used to provide management information to its branches across New Zealand. The bank found a solution using the business intelligence (BI) tools supported by Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, including Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint. With the self-service BI tools, BNZ expects to simplify and accelerate the delivery of information to branches while allowing its BI department to manage the distribution and publication of information with greater efficiency.

Offering a narrow set of products and prices to an equally narrow market segment proved a recipe for success for Canal Insurance—until the company was hit by the recession, rising fuel prices, and new competition. Sales dropped and Canal needed a new strategy. It decided to broaden its range of customers and identify new prices that made the company both more competitive and more profitable. Canal adopted a virtualized business intelligence (BI) solution based on Microsoft technologies. Virtualizing the solution kept costs low, while the new BI tools helped Canal to turn a revenue drop into a revenue gain of 17 percent. Total cost of ownership declined by 40 percent, and Canal is now better able to evaluate new products and prices quickly and effectively.

CBA decided to deploy Microsoft Lync Server 2010 to see how it would integrate with other Microsoft solutions in its network and help make its workforce more productive.

Global investor services specialist Computershare provides communications services to 30,000 clients in more than 20 countries. One of its technology tools – HKeIPO – is a platform that enables companies in Hong Kong that are about to float on the exchange to manage online prospectus requests and receive share applications. Computershare hosted HKeIPO at its own data centres. However, the large server capacity the platform required was idle between floats, and bandwidth spikes during the short float periods were enormous. In 2010, Computershare exported this platform into the cloud with Windows Azure. The move took six weeks and within a month the platform was used to host investor enquiries for one of Hong Kong’s biggest initial public offerings (IPOs). The cloud-based platform-as-a-service easily accommodated peaks in service demand and cost less than five per cent of the nominal costs of onsite hosting.

Among stock exchanges, low latency—the speed at which a stock trade can be processed—is supreme. Direct Edge wanted to reduce the already low latency of its system, while supporting vastly larger trading volumes. It accomplished those goals and more by rejecting Linux or UNIX choices, instead building its new exchange on technology from Microsoft and Informatica. Since deploying Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Informatica Ultra Messaging, Direct Edge has reduced latency by 83 percent, to just 340 microseconds, enabling a 580 percent increase in throughput, and it envisions further cuts in latency. Uptime is 100 percent to date. Since implementation, the company’s market share has increased based in part on its choice of platform. A 50 percent reduction in time to market meant a savings of U.S.$14 million in reduced operational costs. And a 25 percent smaller hardware footprint saved another $1 million.

Ditzo, based in the Netherlands, entered the insurance market in 2007. It aims to provide customers with a self-service Web site that helps them obtain and modify their insurance quotes online. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Virtual Affairs, Ditzo developed the site using the Microsoft .NET Framework, and Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 for integration with the site’s many applications and services. Through the Web site, people can apply for insurance in just two minutes and manage their policies online. As the company’s primary sales channel, the site’s easy-to-use tools and clear presentation have inspired customer confidence and driven rapid growth for Ditzo, which, in just two years, has become one of country’s leading online insurance retailers.

Esurance has been offering auto insurance policies online since 1999. Today, the majority of its customers purchase their policies from the company’s user-friendly Web site. Many of those customers carry mobile devices, so Esurance decided to migrate some of its applications to run in the mobile environment. The company chose the software-plus-services strategy to offer this new option for using its products. In just six weeks, Esurance used the Microsoft NET Framework 3.5 to migrate its applications to the Windows Mobile® 6.1 operating system. It also integrated two services: a text-messaging gateway and AutoWatch, which customers use to view photos of their car being repaired at an auto body shop. Esurance is poised to capture the mobile market with more claims-related features than the competition and expects to boost customer retention, cut costs, and drive revenue.

Garanti Pension and Life is a leading provider of pension and life insurance services in Turkey. By deploying Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and supporting technologies the company has transformed the quality of customer service throughout the pensions and life insurance product lifecycle. Customer enquiries are resolved in just over a day rather than three days under the previous system, while sales teams are now 25 per cent more efficient.

Auto insurance provider GEICO provides coverage to more than 10 million people in the United States and uses Windows Phone 7 to connect with them. GEICO created a mobile application called GloveBox that customers can use to pay bills, obtain policy ID information, and receive helpful advice in tough situations such as changing a flat tire. GEICO also supports Windows Phone 7 as a corporate phone for its sleek and easy-to-use interface, quick navigation, and seamless integration of Microsoft Office. Employees are as mobile as their customers are. They can work on the go, place calls, send email, create appointments, and attend meetings. With Windows Phone 7, GEICO can connect with customers, wherever they may be.

Generali USA Life Reassurance Company ran its mission-critical applications and data on an IBM OS/390 mainframe that was increasingly difficult to update, use, and rely on. The company evaluated several database options: DB2 on a contemporary mainframe, Linux, UNIX, and Windows; Oracle; and Microsoft SQL Server. All provided mission-critical reliability and scalability, but SQL Server provided the lowest total cost of ownership. Generali USA then rewrote its applications and migrated its data to SQL Server. The results: The company expects to save U.S.$2.7 million a year; it now has both more choice and more control over mission-critical systems; and the democratization of data gives business users more and faster information for better risk analysis and pricing. The company envisions extending data access to its customers, helping to enhance customer relationships and increase revenues.

HML—which specialises in financial outsourcing for financial institutions in the U.K. and Ireland—needed to improve operational risk management to avoid unnecessary losses and bolster compliance. The firm relied on spreadsheets and disparate databases to analyse performance and risk, but recognised the need for a more rigorous approach. This led to Microsoft Certified Partner Stratex Systems delivering StratexPoint—a risk management, governance, and compliance solution designed to meet the demands of the executive team, as well as the expectations of the Financial Services Authority. StratexPoint is powered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server technology and was central to supporting a “risk-led” transformation at HML, with an improved risk framework and new focus on key controls. As a result, the firm has significantly reduced operational losses, as well as its regulatory capital. Situation

To properly manage pension funds, ING Insurance Benelux ran Monte Carlo simulations on standalone PCs. The company wished to speed up the process so that risk managers could run many more simulations, giving them increased accuracy and greater confidence. It worked with Bitbrains IT Services to deploy a cloud-based solution that uses the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 operating system and the HPC Excel Acceleration Toolkit from Grid Dynamics.

Insphere Insurance Solutions, one of the nation’s largest independent career-agent distribution groups, serves small businesses and the middle-income individual market. Insphere aims to be the leading distribution channel for each of its strategic carrier partners and wants to double its field sales force over the next few years. The company sought to make the agent experience as productive and streamlined as possible. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner VUE Software, Insphere implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM in integration with VUE IncentivePoint and VUE Compensation Management. Now, Insphere provides an extremely efficient field-selling environment, drives more productive agent activities, and gives managers visibility into agent activities. The unified software environment is a key component of the company’s value proposition for retaining and recruiting agents.

Investec Bank (Channel Islands)—a specialist provider of offshore private banking services—wanted to improve its core banking technology and manage its growing intermediary business more effectively. Vega Solutions replaced the bank’s previous banking system with a customised banking solution called Vision Online, based on Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server. Investec has doubled its revenue since 2004 without needing any extra back-office staff since the software went live. In the meantime, Vega Solutions has provided further enhancements. This has included integration with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network using Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, and online banking giving customers straight-through processing for payments.

Key Bank is one of the largest bank-based financial services companies in the United States, with U.S.$95 billion in assets. To boost efficiency at its branches, the bank implemented a new IT infrastructure built with the Microsoft Application Platform. With its new solution, KeyBank has streamlined mission-critical operations, increased system performance, maintained high levels of availability, improved customer service levels, and achieved greater flexibility and agility.

Kuveyt Türk needed to increase the flexibility, scalability, and transparency of its core banking system to speed the deployment of offerings that make use of the bank’s 5 terabytes of customer and financial data. To do so, the bank built a new mission-critical system with the Microsoft platform. As a result, the bank has boosted innovation, scalability, and performance—and reduced the time-to-market of customer-focused services.

Maybank Singapore offers customers a diverse range of financial services. With numerous lines of business offering a multitude of products to a large customer base, the bank wanted to improve how it served its customers by providing sales, marketing and services teams with accurate customer information while facilitating collaboration between business units. After a detailed review process, the bank selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM to support its drive towards continuously improving customer service. With a single view of all customer information, the bank has benefited from reduced operating costs and greater collaboration, leading to an improved service experience for its customers.

Mercer, a global pension consulting firm, developed a new actuarial valuation system that required a sharp increase in numerical computations. By adopting high-performance computing (HPC) with Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003, Mercer improved calculation speeds by a factor of 10. The new HPC system enhanced the functionality of Mercer’s retirement consulting services while keeping cluster management costs low.

MKB Bank is a prominent, universal financial institution in the Hungarian banking sector. It is a leader in all customer segments for the completeness of the product portfolio, the standards of services and the intensity of customer relations. It is traditionally strong in the corporate and organizational market and project financing. At the same time, there is a growing presence in the public and SMB segments and in financial and capital market services. The main owner, BayernLB Group (headquartered in Munich) has assigned MKB Bank the role of a bridgehead in implementing its strategy in certain countries of the Central and Eastern European region. As part of that role, MKB Bank also acts as the owner of MKB Unionbank in Bulgaria and that of MKB Romexterra Bank in Romania. The share capital amounts to HUF 14.094 billion. In line with its strategy, MKB Bank has implemented an operational CRM and front-end solution, using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform, to provide a standard view of customers and integrated access to all channels of the sales campaigns. Therefore the solution boosts the efficiency of more than 1000 people in the entire sales network, also supporting management in measuring and motivating performance.

Morgan Keegan & Company, founded in 1969 in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the nation’s largest regional investment firms, offering full-service investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth and asset management. Although the firm has long relied on email and instant messaging to communicate both internally and with clients, it wanted to develop a more integrated solution that would help move it away from disparate legacy technologies. Morgan Keegan decided to deploy Microsoft Lync Server 2010, formerly Microsoft Office Communications Server, to see how this technology would integrate with other Microsoft solutions in its network and provide communication capabilities such as presence, instant messaging, ad hoc conferencing and collaboration, and enterprise voice that could help make its workforce more productive.

Nationale Suisse Belgium is a subsidiary of international Swiss insurance group Nationale Suisse. In Belgium, it has a network of around 450 active credit brokers selling its life insurance products and 1,800 brokers selling its non-life products. To maintain competitive advantage, the insurer needed to modernise the way it managed its broker network and automate manual and paper-based processes.

Nationwide Building Society in the United Kingdom (U.K.) is a major force in retail financial services, and maintains its competitive edge by continually seeking ways of improving customer services. As a founding member of the U.K.’s Faster Payments Service, Nationwide needed a solution to reduce the time taken for settlement of payments between customers’ accounts from three days to near real time. Microsoft Services mitigated the building society’s risk by taking on responsibility for the end-to-end delivery of the entire project. Not only were the requirements extensive and complex, but it also had to be delivered within a short timeframe. Microsoft Services took just 14 weeks to design and deliver the improved business-critical solution. Nationwide now has a secure, high-performing, and easily maintainable Faster Payments Service.

North Shore Credit Union (NSCU) is a Vancouver-based financial services organization that delivers banking, insurance and investment services. To achieve greater efficiencies and enhanced service delivery in a highly competitive marketplace, NSCU wanted to unify information for a number of databases and gain a more integrated view of its membership base. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Temenos, NSCU deployed a comprehensive core banking platform running on Microsoft-based technologies. Today, NSCU is meeting its technology and industry challenges by improved data management and trend forecasting, all of which improves member service and gives them a clear competitive advantage.

PREMIER Bankcard, LLC (PREMIER) one of the largest VISA and MasterCard credit providers in the United States, needed to enhance scalability and performance for its business intelligence (BI) data warehouse and online transaction processing (OLTP) databases. “BI began as an area of research for us, but has become absolutely mission critical,” says Dan Zerfas, Vice President of Software Development at PREMIER. The company enhanced its BI infrastructure by upgrading its 17-terabyte data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Enterprise (64-bit), hosted on a server computer with 16 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. PREMIER also upgraded its OLTP database to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2008. The upgraded deployments provide a better view of the business, enterprise-grade scalability, maintenance without scheduled downtime, and easier database management.

Raymond James provides a range of investment services through a network of more than 5,000 financial advisors operating in 2,200 locations around the world. To help these advisors continue to make fast, accurate, and cost-effective decisions, Raymond James created a suite of business intelligence (BI) tools that advisors use to analyze vast stores of product, client, and market data. The company’s BI platform is based on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 data management software and SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. Today, 6,600 people use the Raymond James Reports Center to help make cost-effective decisions. By using software that Raymond James already owns, the firm will save U.S.$500,000 every three years in licensing efficiencies and will also eliminate additional training costs.

RiskMetrics Group’s Risk Management Business delivers risk management services to the world’s leading asset managers, banks, and institutions to help them measure and model complex financial instruments. To meet increasing market demand for risk analysis, RiskMetrics needed to accommodate increasing peak loads on its computing infrastructure for specific periods of time. The company used the Windows Azure™ platform —an Internet-scale services platform hosted in Microsoft® data centers—to provide on-demand computing capacity for its analytics applications. Now RiskMetrics can complement its on-premises capabilities with a flexible, reliable solution that can support bursts in computing activity over short periods of time, deliver enhanced services for more customers, empower innovation, and provide the company with increased business agility.

Financial advisors at SEB Wealth Management, a division of SEB, one of Sweden’s premier banks, demand in-depth knowledge about their high-worth customers to provide the very best service. The company is replacing its homegrown customer relationship management (CRM) system with one built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. SEB Wealth Management was able to complete the first phase of the rollout in just five months and create an engaging, easy-to-use interface by using Microsoft Silverlight. With the new system, SEB financial advisors have a better view of their customers’ portfolios and lives so that they can serve them better. With the development efficiencies provided by Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft development tools, the CRM team has sped up the rollout of new features by 50 percent and now spends 75 percent of its CRM budget on development and only 25 percent on maintenance.

Global insurance and banking company Skandia collaborated with Microsoft on a project to upgrade its online banking services with Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2. Thanks to the collaboration, which included attendance at a three-week Performance and Stability Lab, Skandia has found the right environment to improve Web performance significantly. The Internet bank also predicts it can serve more than 1 million clients a day with the solution.

Skandinavisk Data Center (SDC) helps small and medium-sized banks compete with larger ones by providing competitive IT services at an affordable price. To maintain its long-term viability, SDC is moving its core banking system from an IBM mainframe to the Microsoft Application Platform. By doing so, SDC can deliver 99.8 percent availability, increase agility, and provide high performance. In addition, the company can save more than DKK100 million (U.S.$16 million) in yearly operational costs.

Storebrand is a leading financial services provider in Norway and Sweden. Microsoft Dynamics CRM replaced a number of disparate systems so sales and service departments can strengthen relationships with their customers. Since deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM, they have been able to be more productive by reducing headcount while tripling their client base.

When the recession hit, Sun National Bank had the foresight to anticipate the inevitable recovery. Sun saw technology as a way to increase its competitive advantage ahead of better times. It wanted a centralized, enterprisewide customer relationship management (CRM) solution to strengthen existing relationships and capture new business. After considering options that included a popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) package, Sun chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Sun gained a flexible framework for CRM that it could customize and integrate easily with core systems. The results: Sun estimates that it reduced the time to deploy by 67 percent and the cost to deploy by 75 percent compared to the SaaS option. Cross-selling at Sun is up by close to 20 percent; the time to approve loans has been shortened by 80 percent; and Sun even gained a tool with which to speed the integration of acquisitions.

Founded in 1984, Syarikat Takaful Malaysia is Malaysia’s leading provider of Islamic insurance with 955 employees, managing over MYR 4.67 billion (U.S.$1.9 billion) in assets. As part of a company-wide business revamp, Takaful Malaysia wanted to deploy hosted email services for its top insurance agents in the shortest timeframe possible. To reduce implementation time, the organization deployed Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) to establish remote access and email accounts for 200 of its top agents in less than two weeks, and at a lower cost than traditional email.

Oregon-based Umpqua Bank is known for its strategy of using its branches as customer-friendly sales sites. To extend that same inviting atmosphere to its Web site, Umpqua Bank adopted Voyager Consumer Banking from Fiserv—based on Microsoft® operating system and data management software—to create a personalized suite of online banking services for its 250,000 customers. Umpqua Bank now has the flexibility, scalability, availability, and cost-effectiveness that it needs to be innovative and competitive in the tough financial services market. Umpqua Bank expects to attract more customers and to double its online service usage to 40 percent within two years. It also expects maintenance costs to drop significantly due to consolidation of its online systems.

Willis Re―supported by its research arm the Willis Research Network (WRN)―runs increasingly complex natural catastrophe risk models to keep pace with developments in its field. To meet the challenge, the Willis Re Analytics Product Development Team created a high-performance computing (HPC) environment built on Windows HPC Server 2008. The organisation can now run selected models in a quarter of the time, delivering a faster response to client needs.

Zurich Financial Services boasts an impressive Risk Engineering operation spanning 35 countries and employing nearly 1,000 risk specialists in various disciplines. However, the company relied on disparate regional systems to collect customer data, making it difficult to derive insights across geographies and industries. To help ensure consistent data collection and analysis, Zurich built a Global Risk Engineering Workstation (GREW) based on the xRM application development framework in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The Risk Engineering team at Zurich used xRM to simplify the development process and complete a significant portion of the application without the help of outside developers. The Risk Engineering team now adds greater value to the overall organization, especially by helping the policy-underwriting group and customers better understand risk exposure and identify potential solutions.