What is Normal in Today’s Environment
The financial services industry experienced unprecedented change over the last eighteen months and is still facing many challenges. Continuing economic uncertainty, mergers, increasing regulation, uncertain consumer loyalty, brand disappearance, and decreasing margins to name just a few. While all of these continue to present challenges, they also present unique opportunities for innovation to attract new customers, differentiate from the competition, and focus on world class customer organizations (sales and service).
Much of the focus over the last eighteen months was on reducing costs (operational and people). While it is important to continue to focus on cost and efficiency, we must also look at new models in which we can drive down cost (Cloud/Azure). it is also imperative that we reconcile ourselves to the ‘New Normal’, to driving business in a world where we need to have a clear 360 degree view of the customer across all systems, where time to market is of the essence in order to continue to be a player, and where we need to continue to ensure we can meet the ever growing regulatory environment. With low-cost, high-value technology solutions from Microsoft and its many ISV partners, financial services companies can meet these imperatives and achieve a competitive edge.
Reducing the Cost of Business through Azure
For example, RiskMetrics, a U.S. research and analysis firm, provides some of the leading investment banks, hedge funds, pension funds, insurers, and others with risk models (over 4million of them daily). They develop complex Monte Carlo simulation models for their customers to help them analyze risk and return. Given the increasing demand for their services in these uncertain economic times and the ever increasing regulatory environment, they were looking for a way to provide deeper, faster, more responsive models enhancing their business agility while also reducing their level of investment in the computing power needed to create and run these models. In the words of Rod Fraser, Head of Cloud Computing for RiskMetrics, “We’re using Windows Azure to meet the evolving needs of our clients. And with the reduced levels of new investment required, we can consider solutions that might otherwise not have been possible.” Read the case study.
Better Serving the Customer
Today, financial services companies need to get close to their customers and stay close. Microsoft solutions drive this capability in a number of ways: platforms and solutions for digital marketing, Concierge Service online, social networking, and blogging help organizations make deeper connections with customers and create the customer experiences of the future. These interactions are what Gen X, Gen Y, and the Millennials use at home and expect to find at work and in their leisure pursuits, too. This is becoming increasing important as a differentiator as customers shop around, brands disappear, and the new generation is increasingly online with multiple devices.
Crédit Agricole S.A. is Europe’s leading banking group in terms of retail banking revenues. The bank has over 9,089 branches in France and operates in 70 countries with 161,800 employees worldwide. Using the improved conferencing capabilities in Microsoft, Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Crédit Agricole plans to facilitate enhanced collaboration, helping financial experts share information more easily and make better business decisions through the use of OCS, web conferencing, and video conferencing. They will be able to provide enhanced services via the technology to customers in remote areas without increasing their costs through this innovative approach. The customer can be serviced directly from the expert's desktop through OCS. Read the case study.
In addition, large banks in the US and Europe are using innovative approaches within the branch to attract customers, such as applications using Surface technology in their marquis branches. These devices provide an interactive means to work with the client on their total portfolio and demonstrate the various offerings of the bank. See the video.
Providing Solutions in Today’s Regulatory Environment
The global risk oversight and regulatory environment is rapidly evolving and companies are under pressure to meet the deadlines for new regulations such as Liquidity Risk, Solvency2, IFRS, e-discovery etc. Many companies are reviewing their current and future states of risk and compliance efforts as a competitive advantage.
Microsoft believes that the future state of risk management and compliance would revolve around the principles of efficiency, productivity, innovation and creativity, with focus on simpler, faster and cost-effective adoption. The focus on people, policies, processes, workflows, data and reporting as the basic building blocks for Risk Management and Compliance initiatives continue to strengthen all companies regardless of their core business.
Microsoft is involved in many strategic next generation Transparency, Risk oversight and regulatory control projects. One example is a solution the Microsoft Financial Services team in the U.S. collaborated on with Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM) to market BNYM fund services with Microsoft’s Stimulus 360 ‘BI and Reporting Services’ solution tailored to meet the ARRA reporting requirements. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 is comprised of $787 billion in stimulus funding and is included in the $12 trillion of monies that the U.S. Government committed for State and Local Governments with strict reporting guidelines associated with these funds.
Microsoft is committed to helping our customers connect with their customers, grow their businesses, and innovate in the current environment through our platform and our partner solutions which are cost effective, scalable, meet mission critical requirement, and provide seamless integration through data analysis/insight across multiple systems.
In the video at right, Steve Ballmer discusses the powerful partnership with Mysis that is bringing the choice and flexibility of the cloud and Windows Azure to the banking industry.
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