Check out these top stories for the latest news of the week for Microsoft partners in the Americas.
Partner Audience: All Partners
Relevant to: Financial Services, #SuccessStory
As organizations continue to grapple with the impact and aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, adaptation to a new reality is a necessary survival skill to ensure business resiliency and accelerate growth. In the financial services industry, the push to modernize infrastructure creates an opportunity to address challenges that have long plagued the industry.
The growing demand for mobile and online banking is making it easier for customers to access financial services from wherever they are. Greater industry regulation intended to protect consumers is another common practice. Additionally, there’s a shift toward consolidation, with larger financial institutions acquiring smaller ones. These directional movements are likely to continue in the coming years, as the industry continues to evolve and adapt to changing market conditions.
The power of cloud computing
Key to keeping up with the pace of change is a move away from legacy and monolithic technology, migrating to cloud architecture to break down data silos and connect disparate systems. The power of cloud computing fuels successful financial industry businesses. Cloud computing provides scalability, reliability, cybersecurity, and the ability to harness insights from data through AI—resulting in an improved customer experience.
Now let’s explore how Microsoft is collaborating with our trusted partners to innovate and challenge the status quo. Together we’re finding ways for financial services companies to modernize, manage their assets, and streamline their systems to improve efficiency, speed, and customer satisfaction.
Partner success stories
Fiserv
When financial services technology leader Fiserv wanted to help clients modernize and transform their payment process infrastructure, they leveraged Azure to achieve their goals.
“Banker’s hours” are a thing of the past. Payment processing used to take days for validation and security checks. Banks also used to rely on on-premises data centers and multiple systems to handle different kinds of payments. Complexity is costly and slow in a world that expects services to be available around the clock. Fiserv offers solutions that simplify and consolidate multiple systems to deliver advanced information and personalization services, with the reliability expected of financial institutions.
By using Azure, Fiserv is now able to provide modern, real-time payment processing, which simplifies payment operations and reduces costs for financial institutions.
BECU and Microsoft partner Amperity
BECU is a not-for-profit credit union that places a high value on the customer experience. When working with legacy siloed systems and business units along with significant quantiles of customer data held in different locations, they couldn’t assemble a holistic view of their customer. They wanted a more complete view, a centralized system, and a more automated way to manage data. As a highly regulated industry, they had to meet strict requirements for privacy and security.
BECU turned to Microsoft partner Amperity because of their seamless integration with Azure and other tools in their marketing stack. Amperity gathered customer records from previously siloed systems, delivering a dedicated database for BECU to leverage rich and detailed customer insights, while also saving time on weekly email dashboard reporting and monthly marketing execution.
BlackRock and Microsoft partner Aladdin
BlackRock is a brand that’s widely recognized because of its stature in the financial services industry. It’s no wonder that Aladdin, the tech platform they built to manage their business, is sought after by hundreds of other companies.
Historically, BlackRock ran Aladdin on-premises from its own corporate datacenters. By owning the datacenters, they had fine-grained access control over all aspects of their infrastructure. But it was expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to respond to spiking demands in periods of market volatility. BlackRock started investigating the option of moving Aladdin’s technology to the cloud for increased scalability and flexibility. When it was time to choose a cloud provider, BlackRock had already established a long-term partnership with Microsoft and migrating to Azure was the clear choice.
BlackRock is already seeing the results. They can spin up a new client environment in weeks, instead of quarters; they can reach client segments that were previously out of reach; they can bring new solutions to market faster; and they have the ability to provide Aladdin for clients in regions where there wasn’t a local datacenter footprint—while still maintaining fine-grained access control of their infrastructure.
Betterment with Helix by Microsoft partner Q2
Betterment is a New York City-based investment firm that seeks to make financial savings and investments simpler and easier for consumers. Their core customers are millennial professionals, who consume financial services online. To meet the demands of their customer base, Betterment wanted a compliant, capable, secure, and robust way to host accounts in the cloud. They selected the Helix technology from Q2, a Microsoft partner. Helix is one of the industry’s only cloud-native banking cores, which was purposely built for finance. It runs on a suite of Azure services that facilitates easy and secure data sharing with cloud-based analytics, along with proactive alerts on balances and transactions.
By using Helix, Betterment was able to support a lighter, cloud-based version of the core banking ledgering system that was both cost-efficient and customizable. The result is a low-cost banking platform that doesn’t compromise security or quality of services. The low-latency services from Helix have helped Betterment increase user counts by more than 100 percent year-over-year (YOY), with no performance latency.
Drexel Hamilton with Microsoft partner Xerillion
When Drexel Hamilton was looking for efficiency in their IT spending, they learned that they could eliminate on-premises servers and gain increased functionality and capacity by moving more of their environment to the cloud. The big surprise was that they already had everything they needed through their existing Microsoft 365 subscription. Microsoft partner Xerillion helped Drexel Hamilton see how they could leverage the full advantages of their subscription and compound the value they were already receiving. Since migrating to Microsoft 365, Drexel Hamilton has experienced improved communication and collaboration, increased efficiency and productivity, reduced IT costs, and enhanced cybersecurity.
Reimagine your business with these and other Microsoft partners. Learn how:
- PwC is building a multitenant enterprise decision support site and solving more problems, faster.
- Duck Creek Technologies is using Azure Kubernetes to bring technical innovation to insurance carries.
- Apex Group is optimizing costs, safeguarding data, and unlocking value through Azure Virtual Desktop.
- Finastra is building an open platform that accelerates collaboration and innovation in financial services to create better experiences for people, businesses, and communities.
Delivering solutions together
Technology is making it easier and more convenient for people to access and manage their finances, while enabling banks to provide better services to their customers. The future of the financial industry includes technological resources that will deliver speed, security, reliability, compliance, and the personalized services that customers expect. The cloud is the fast track to delivering the resources financial services companies need. Azure is the most trusted cloud and our trusted partners are the key to the success of our customers.
Learn how to become a Microsoft partner.
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