Commercial Bank of Dubai: backing the ambitions of the UAE with Microsoft Azure and cloud innovation

Established over five decades ago, the Commercial Bank of Dubai exclusively serves the people and businesses in the country. With a rich legacy symbolized by the iconic Deira clock tower in its logo, it continues to offer a comprehensive suite of financial services. "We support large, medium-sized corporates and the small-and-medium enterprises which are building the nation and are the backbone of the UAE economy," begins Thomas Cherian, Chief Information Officer at Commercial Bank of Dubai. The bank embeds technology in its operations and objectives to power Dubai’s entrepreneurial and financial ambitions, spearheading innovation in the region’s financial industry.

Starting in 2019 and accelerating in 2022, Commercial Bank of Dubai launched a strategy refresh program to bring more scalability to its impressive business. “We are seeing five- to eight-time growth rates in transactions, volume, and the number of clients,” shares Cherian. “We needed applications that could scale horizontally and vertically to handle massive transaction volumes.”

Embracing the power of the cloud

Committing to the cloud-first approach, the Commercial Bank of Dubai partnered with Microsoft to implement the full suite of its cloud solutions. “This decision was driven by three key factors,” comments Cherian. “Firstly, we wanted to gain fast insights into customer behavior and sentiments to ensure a hyper-personalized banking experience. We also expected the cloud to offer better cost transparency and ownership than on-premises solutions. And finally, we were looking to speed up time to market for products and services relevant for our customers.”

With these goals on the agenda, the bank moved critical systems, like the payment infrastructure or customer interaction channels, to Microsoft Azure. Employee collaboration and communication have centered around the full suite of upgraded Microsoft 365 applications. “We’ve put Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and other tools at the heart of our operations,” Cherian confirms. Finally, the bank adopted Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service to enhance customer experience and deliver personalized services.

Gaining trust, winning hearts

Microsoft Azure has been instrumental in fostering rapid development and deployment of business-critical applications and launching new customer-facing services. “The migration of our payment platform to the Azure cloud led to increased transaction volumes, grew our customer base by many folds, and improved the reliability of our platform, benefiting both us and our customers,” shares Cherian.

With a robust, scalable, agile infrastructure, more visibility, and enhanced employee productivity and collaboration, the Commercial Bank of Dubai has brought customer experience to the next level. The combined capabilities of Microsoft clouds enable its teams to understand customers’ behavior and their sentiments as well as conduct thorough analyses. “We can readily access the data on the Azure cloud and use it for analytics in Dynamics 365,” Cherian explains. "This, in turn, allows us to offer enhanced, hyper-personalized customer experiences and manage customer queries and complaints more effectively, providing a remarkable experience.”

Enhancing business value, security, and customer experience has come with even more cost transparency—a crucial implementation objective. “That’s the beauty of the cloud,” says Cherian. “We clearly understand what and how we're spending.”

Lastly, the bank has crossed the final trust threshold: solidifying its reputation for first-rate security. “We have been rated the top in the country regarding cybersecurity scores in 2023 by SecurityScorecard. A significant part of the credit for this goes to Microsoft Azure, as it gives us various tools to safeguard our applications and protect customer data,” Cherian adds.

All these efforts, enabled by the cloud, haven’t remained unnoticed by the bank’s customers. “We have the highest rated application among local banks in both App Store and Play Store, with a rating of 4.8 and 4.9, respectively, and this extremely resilient, stable infrastructure has played a key role,” reveals Cherian.

Always advancing to sustain growth

The bank continues its partnership with Microsoft, using SharePoint Online to build a powerful intranet and becoming one of the first financial companies in the UAE to do so. “We want to take advantage of the interconnectedness of the Microsoft ecosystem to make work smoother for our teams,” notes Cherian. “Power Apps is another area we've started using and seen immense benefits, particularly in automating internal processes and speeding up delivery, thanks to it not requiring much coding knowledge," he adds. 

Moreover, the bank is looking at exploring more Dynamics 365 modules like customer insights and using Azure’s availability zones to introduce an additional layer of redundancy and disaster recovery. Another top priority is experimenting with generative artificial intelligence capabilities offered by Microsoft 365 Copilot. "We're a nimble bank capable of making fast decisions,” sums up Cherian. “This journey is about future-proofing our technology landscape, and we look to our partnership with Microsoft to make us—and our clients—successful.”