Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services: New updates to further accelerate growth, innovation, and connected customer experiences

What's new: Strengthening of partner opportunities, expansion into new markets, and enhanced customer experience capabilities

Financial services organizations around the world have been focused on how to best accelerate their digital agendas. At the center of this modernization is the need to better serve their clients and empower employees, while at the same time reducing the costs of running their business. And they need to do this quickly.  

The key to digital transformation success is having the ability to make available internal and external data and turn it into analytical and predictive power using cloud and AI innovations.

We designed Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services with those needs in mind and have begun this journey to accelerate transformation in retail banking. Our offering is built on an industry data model to enable institutions to bring data and information flows together with rich insights to enhance customer and employee experiences, optimize business processes, accelerate products to market, and speed time to value. It also comes with a foundation of privacy, security, and regulatory compliance across Microsoft and our partner ecosystem. 

We’re continually expanding our Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services offering to help more customers take advantage of these capabilities and drive innovation for responsible growth. To that end, we are excited to share our latest milestones including our partner momentum, expanded market availability, and enhanced capabilities for creating more connected and differentiated customer experiences.

Growth of our partner ecosystem 

Our partner ecosystem has been a key component to the success and scalability of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. Our partners are dedicated to better serve customers by helping provide more integrated solutions that reduce risk across the ecosystem, identify new opportunities for innovation, and decrease time to market.  

Since Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services became generally available in November 2021, we’re thrilled with the interest and support from leading system integrators (SIs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to extend its capabilities. We've further partnered with organizations including Accenture, ArganoArbela, ASC, Bambu, BioCatch, Mambu, PwC, Seismic, and Thought Machine to develop joint solutions that deliver a differentiated customer experience, empower employees, and manage enterprise risk with solutions built on our offering. To date, we now have more than 90 partners in our program and more than 25 solutions built on Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services that our customers can take advantage of for their unique needs.

Expanding availability

Microsoft is committed to supporting customers around the globe. Previously available in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, we’re expanding our offering to include another nine countriesAustralia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.  

Further, as part of our commitment to providing a complete product experience, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is now available in six languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. We have plans to continue to extend our cloud presence in many more markets and languages in the coming months. 

Enhanced customer experiences capabilities

The key to great customer engagements is to continuously improve offerings that add value to the banking experience and more seamlessly connect people, processes, and systems. In our new release, and based on customer feedback, we have focused on continued improvements to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services' banking customer engagement capability to deliver differentiated customer experiences.

This capability connects the banking value chain and helps agents personalize every customer interaction with financial understanding to engage with customers on their preferred channel. It intelligently manages service journeys across channels, helping reduce churn and time to resolution. A key new feature, now available in preview for the United States and the United Kingdom markets, is Intelligent Appointments.

The benefits of Intelligent Appointments

Intelligent Appointments are designed to provide customers and banking contact centers with a meeting scheduling experience, online or in-person, that easily and quickly matches the customer’s financial needs with a relevant advisor who is skilled, available, and ready to offer meaningful interactions. This feature leverages Universal Resource Scheduling and the financial services data model for results while connecting seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Teams.

It’s also incredibly easy to set up a smart scheduling experience using Intelligent Appointments. As shown in this visual, process automation is key to offering flexible scheduling, providing anytime, anywhere access, and ensuring that the needs of the business and customer are met:

We are excited about how this series of updates builds on our strong foundation, and for our continued future investment in the financial services industry. 

Learn more

To learn more about how Microsoft and its partners are driving innovation in financial services with Microsoft Cloud technology, listen to Bill Borden's recent conversation with Dan Latimore, Chief Research Officer at Celent. And to continuously stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, visit our website.

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