Listen: Microsoft to expand cloud-based financial services offering

Microsoft plans to expand its Cloud for Financial Services offering beyond the U.S. and Canada to Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. Beyond geography, the expansion also includes updated language and functionality, Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, says in today’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast. The cloud-based offering launched in November 2021 . “We'll have plans to continue to extend our presence in many more markets and languages in the coming months,” Borden tells Bank Automation News . “We're going to extend the Microsoft Cloud financial services capabilities in terms of reach and function, as well as geolocations.” There are also plans to build out the tech giant’s independent software vendor and partner community for financial services, he says. “If you can think of extending collaboration capabilities that we have naturally in our Microsoft Cloud set, a partner can actually start to build those into their application more readily out of the box to integrate with Office 365 or to integrate with teams, for example,” Borden tells BAN. While some financial institutions may worry about security in the cloud, Borden argues it can improve a bank’s overall security posture by removing it from individual silos and scaling through the cloud. “There's a multitude of products that institutions have used almost as point solutions in silos. That can also add to the challenge or the problem,” Borden tells BAN . “Because as things are siloed, that opens up opportunities for identifying weaknesses, and so the idea of raising your security strategy platform up at a scale level, to manage across your entire enterprise — the cloud gives you the scale and the platform to do that.” During the podcast, Borden also discusses the proliferation of bad bots, other threats to financial institutions and how the cloud can help automate security. Artificial intelligence and analytics can be applied to threat monitoring in an integrated fashion, he adds. The $1.4 trillion TD Bank , Switzerland-based $1.1 trillion UBS and Netherlands-based $427 million ABN AMRO are among the financial institutions using Microsoft’s cloud services in conjunction with their multicloud environments, Borden says. “The idea of having an integrated set of tools to do that from edge to cloud is architecturally what our strategy is about,” he says. “We provide a set of capabilities to do that.” Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes , Spotify , Google podcast , or download the episode .

The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors. Loraine Lawson Good day and welcome to Bank Automation New’s podcast series, The Buzz. I’m BAN Editor Loraine Lawson, and recently I spoke with Bill Borden, the corporate vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. We talked about security in the cloud and how banks are leveraging Microsoft Cloud. I began by asking Mr. Borden about his contention that the cloud can actually improve a bank’s overall security posture. Bill Borden Sure, as a financial institutions, look, to use technology, obviously, to run their businesses and to provide their products and services to their customers. As they innovate and use technology innovate, they also are going to use technology to innovate around their security posture, and how they manage security and compliance and control structures. And doing that at scale is important. With the amount of endpoints terms of devices and servers that are out there, that you have to manage, you've got a wide surface. And the ability to create your security and compliance and monitoring programs at scale, falls naturally to using the ability of cloud technology to obviously offer that at scale of well as well. And so the idea of managing multiple tools, and multiple approaches around data security and privacy and endpoint protection can be challenging. There's a multitude of products that institutions have used almost as point solutions are in silos. And that can also add to the challenge or the problem, if you will, that kind of opens up opportunities for bad actors and predators. Because as as, as things are siloed, that opens up opportunities for identifying weaknesses. And so the idea of raising your security strategy platform up at a scale level, to manage across your entire enterprise. The Cloud gives you the scale and the platform to do that. We provide a set of integrated tools around that from Microsoft's point of view to do that. And we also provide tools to manage in a multiple cloud, on-premise environment so we can help our customers create approaches to manage on-premise in a multi cloud environment. And it's in in the ideas the tools give you a point of view, to actually identify not just security elements, but also how you manage your data state. And again, doing that at scale in the cloud, can give you significant advantages around your solutions that you offer, and also trying to limit to some extent, the amount of tools that you can use. Microsoft specifically has capabilities that can interoperate with tools that exists today, or you can use many of the tools that exist in Microsoft suites to actually cut down on the multiple tools that you use. And again, to some extent, when you simplify things, you can also reduce the idea of threatened controls as well. So it's all about scale and the innovation around security and compliance that that should be a part of your day. Little transformation strategies that we talked to customers about. Loraine Lawson So we're about automation, of course, slipped this question in. As a follow up, are there tools that help you automate security that that come with the cloud? Bill Borden The answer is yes. From the standpoint of managing security has to be from endpoint, right your your endpoint devices and desktops all the way we call that the the edge, if you will, of computing up through to the cloud. And you've got to have tools and capabilities that give you the ability to manage security data, data privacy protection, your monitoring, and your threat protection, your reporting and your response mechanisms. How you address breaches in an automated fashion, how you apply AI and analytics, as part of your threat monitoring capabilities in an integrated fashion so that you can respond. And ultimately, as things are detected, how you manage through that all the way up through even managing ransomware, if that's an attack that, unfortunately, has occurred. And so the idea of of having an integrated set of tools to do that from edge to cloud is architecturally what our strategy is about. Also based around a philosophy of zero trust, meaning that even for applications or functions are things that are well or understood within the enterprise. Applying a zero trust mentality means that you will manage things even even though you think you understand them, you will still assume that there's potential threat or potential action that must be addressed. And so with an integrated set of tools, philosophy of zero trust, the idea of thinking through your capability sets to actually apply your tools, your approach to threat monitoring, and then how you extend that to compliance and compliance from a regulatory point of view is really around how you look at your AML operations, your KYC operations, and your data privacy operations. And so how do we give you tools to actually manage all of those things, we provide a set of capabilities to do that, from our endpoint services around Microsoft defender, we provide data governance tools, we have a set of programs within our capabilities called Microsoft purview, which actually looks at data across your your enterprise from a governance point of view, and ended and face identification point of view to determine how you manage and protect that data. And again, doing this in a multi system, multi cloud environment is the environment that our institutions are operating in. And that's how we're building and architecting our tool sets. Loraine Lawson Okay. We've recently received a report on bad bots, and it only looked at one other cloud provider, I think, because that's what their solution ran on But I wondered what you were seeing in terms of bad bots, and what you do to combat bad bots in your infrastructure. Bill Borden The notion of bad bots. And the idea of what occurs around that bots is really based on the the, the data and the environment around how the bot is created in the analytics behind it and the artificial intelligence behind it. And so, you know, our approach around security protection and malicious attacks, and how bots can play into that really has to go back to the fundamental architecture around how the bot is developed, the the intelligence behind it is created. And the applications that that bot is, is is architected in. And so from that standpoint, you know, going back to the zero trust model, and the approach around cybersecurity and how we look at that goes back to the to kind of the philosophy around how that bot was defined and developed. And so So our approach, you know, again, goes back to, you know, our zero trust, assume assume breach approach that we have around the philosophy of implementing and designing and building our tool sets. And this model of zero trust takes a more nuanced approach for managing access to identities, data and devices, within your environment, and within the external environments, that your applications and your systems and the access that you provide your users provide outside of your organization. And so it's really comes back to that design methodology around how you think through how you're going to deploy that bot and how you're going to play your philosophies around using it. And so, we do spend a lot of time thinking through that with our customers. But it goes back to the philosophy of around how we how you design your approach through our zero trust model of philosophy. Loraine Lawson Okay, I was I was reading your blog and saw that the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is using Azura as its primary cloud platform, enabling it to scale and modernize its its banking platform. We hear a lot about that. But I wonder, in what ways does the cloud help banks modernize? And particularly if you're seeing them run their core processing their general Ledger's and cloud yet? Bill Borden Yeah, it's the idea of your enterprise approach to using technology. And how you define innovation around the use of that technology is going to, again, the the idea of your security, compliance and control structures as part of that enterprise architecture is all one in the same way you think about scale and development of scale. And, you know, detection. And what's top of mind with chief security officers, and developers, is all about how do we how do we use the latest technologies to not just, you know, offer capabilities and products and services to our customers, but how do we use the latest technologies to also manage security and compliance at scale, across the enterprise. And, you know, in in large institutions, you're going to have a multitude of products, you can have a multitude of strategies, whether you're running your applications on premise, or whether you're moving to clouds, our expectation is, is that our cloud will be operating in a environment where there could be multiple clouds, or could be a combination of on-prem and cloud architectures. And so as we think through that, we think about our approach to the technologies that we offer, and the philosophy of the Microsoft Cloud, given the depth and breadth of our cloud services across Azure, as well as our business application products with Dynamics, as well as our modern work, Microsoft Office products, our GitHub developer platform, or LinkedIn platform. These are all basic core services and capabilities as part of the Microsoft Cloud. We build these services with an integrated set of interoperability and controls built on a common set of security, compliance and resource control structures as part of our Microsoft Cloud, we've had the opportunity to be being able to extend our Microsoft cloud into specific industry offerings, one of those being the Microsoft Cloud for financial services, where we take the Microsoft Cloud and we can actually extend unique capabilities, specifically for the financial services industry. And we launched the Microsoft Cloud last year with an extensive capabilities offering for the retail banking sector. Because when you bring our cloud services together in an integrated way, you can actually offer products and services in in a assembled way that customers can use more readily. And we announced Microsoft Cloud financial services, we offered retail banking services around client insights around onboarding, these capabilities that could our customers could use more readily out of the box for retail banking. We're excited about that. Because as we integrate our cloud services together, we can offer more things in a readily usable way out of the box, if you will, for our customers to use specifically for their capabilities. And as part of that our security and compliance and control structures. In our approach to that is really important. And so we provided a set of capabilities to support that around compliance. And so for example, we offer a compliance manager program that helps organizations manage their compliance requirements across their enterprise. built off of our cloud services, we offer a compliance manager that actually helps you manage your compliance and requirements as you move to the cloud. And specifically in retail banking, we built a product called account protection feature which helps banks protect their customers online accounts against bot attacks, which you've referred to earlier. fake account creation, account takeover and fraudulent counseling access. We will continue to offer products and services more readily out of our cloud services that our customer can use as part Under the Microsoft Cloud for financial services, it will also within our approach to our Microsoft Cloud stack, it allows our partners to actually leverage our cloud capabilities as well, in our ecosystem of partners that can build into our stack as well. Companies like Biocatch, for example, that build off of our cloud capabilities. They're a SaaS offering that banks can use. And they can actually provide anti money laundering solutions to help banks fight against fraudsters, etc. Around account takeover and account usage. It's a way for institutions to more readily build in partners into their enterprise structures, in a very simple and straightforward way, that eases the ability, for example, for them to attach a certain solution towards a problem that they're facing, particularly in the account takeover space. And so with our cloud services will offer capabilities for security compliance and controls, with our network of partners will give them the opportunity to bring solutions that are more readily available and implementable in our customers, environments as well. And then the security compliance and control structures that we built in our cloud structures, our customers can be been can feel secure about with regards to, if they invest in our cloud capabilities. They know that we're going to have a consistent approach to how we use our tools and structures from endpoint all the way to the cloud. Loraine Lawson You sort of jumped the gun on my next question, you certainly outlined a really good business case for Microsoft's cloud and mentioned several things that differentiate or that that banks should look at when they're doing clouds, including security, the ecosystem that the cloud supports. But I'm wondering, in general, are there? Are there other I know a lot of banks are choosing to go hybrid cloud? And that seems to be what analysts are saying will be typical in the future? Are there other specific things that people should look at when they're considering other banks, in particular should look at when they're considering a cloud solution? Or are there things they're looking at that that maybe would opt for? Choose them dot for hybrid cloud? Bill Borden Yes, many institutions are, are looking at their approach to their private clouds that they've built on-prem. And as they think about scale, and extensibility, and time to value, how do how do they look at expanding on their architectures to actually build capabilities and deliver faster to the market. And with that approach, the view of extending into public cloud and quote, cloud services, offers that advantage of capabilities and services that can drive time to value in terms of offering new capabilities and solutions. And so as part of that digital transformation and innovation strategy, the approach to looking at multiple cloud environment becomes a natural way for customers to think about how to extend their capabilities, and also how to feel comfortable working with multiple partners. And so from that perspective, we understand that in terms of our cloud capabilities and services, we we build our our cloud with the intent of understanding that it will operate in a multi cloud and multi software solution environment. Historically, that's what we've done in terms of all of our platforms, starting from windows, and enabling others to build on our Windows, capabilities and platforms and extending that philosophy into our cloud services. So the the expectation of our capabilities is that it will most likely be operating in a multi cloud environment. And so when we think of tools like Azure Ark, which gives the ability of enterprise control structures that help you manage in a multi cloud environment. And when you think about your data estate, and how you have to manage data across multiple environments, and multiple clouds, and the product that we offer to actually help organizations govern their data across their multi cloud environment, we have a service in product called Microsoft preview, which allows you to have a unified data governance approach to manage data across on premise multi cloud software as a service capabilities across your entire state. This gives you the ability to map all of your information and your data to make data discoverable, to provide analytics on top of that data, to manage privacy and controls across that data in a multi cloud environment. All the philosophies around doing that are important to our structure. And that's why customers ers like TD Bank and UBS and ABN AMRO, have instituted Microsoft's cloud services, in conjunction with their multi cloud environment, to actually have that common control structure in plane as well as common capabilities to manage security and compliance control in that multi cloud environment. Lots of discussion around how we're going to continue to evolve our products to doing that. But that's the environment that our customers want to operate in particular, are largest, most sophisticated customers where they're going to have a variety of capabilities, products and services that they want to manage to run their businesses. Loraine Lawson So are there particular ways that you see banks using Microsoft Cloud for financial services? You mentioned onboarding, are they? Are they looking to enable embedded finance? Or do banking as a service? Are there any trends you're seeing and how banks use Microsoft's cloud solution? Bill Borden Yes, and it's, it's, it's fundamentally building off of our core set of Microsoft cloud services. In the Microsoft Cloud for financial services extends that capability specifically for a retail banking offering right now that we've brought to the market with the initial release of Microsoft Cloud financial services, where we offer a client insights set of capabilities where you have a 360 degree view of your customer for retail banking, you can build a onboarding platform off of that. And embedded in that are also some our compliance manager, and our compliance control structures, capabilities that come with that Microsoft Cloud for financial services that have capabilities that you can build on top of your existing investments in the Microsoft Cloud. And we will continue to do that. And, more importantly, our ecosystem of partners are now building more broadly, to take advantage of our Microsoft Cloud and the Microsoft Cloud for financial services capabilities and retail banking. So they can now embed those capabilities in their solutions in a much richer, faster way, as well. And the idea is all about how do we work with our customers to actually drive time to value around the transformation that they're looking to drive across offering different products and services, offering unique customer experiences across their multi channel environments, offering the ability to manage risk and compliance and control structures in a much broader, richer way. The ability to manage employee collaboration across your front, middle and back office in new and unique ways to create business efficiencies. As institutions are looking to do that in a quicker, faster way, they're looking further into their technology and their tool sets to allow them to manage and do that faster. But again, going back to the theme of your podcast, how do you do all of that transformation in an environment where you also have to manage on a broad scale? The risks that are ever increasing around security and cyber attacks? And ransomware? And how do you do that at scale. So at the same time, that we're offering products and services to drive business advantage with products and services, and new business model capabilities, whether it's extending your applications through embedded banking, as you said, as institutions look to extend their capabilities into other ecosystems, or to look at bringing other capabilities that customers want, as part of their experience, into the banking experience, the movement and exchange of those capabilities inside and out. Also raise the, the, the, the approach and the importance around how you're going to do that in a secure and compliant manner. And so as we think about our security tools around that, and our compliance tools, our data privacy, and data governance tools, we're keeping that architecture in mind around what our institutions are looking to do to drive their businesses, but how they also must maintain that the secure compliant manner, Loraine Lawson sort of stepping outside of security. Have you seen any surprising use cases of cloud from banks ways they've leveraged it that maybe Microsoft didn't predict as a use case or anything particularly clever out there? Bill Borden The financial services institution is been, I believe, a bit on the cutting edge of the use of cloud technologies across the entire value chain of banking, capital markets and insurance. And I say that because of the amount of, of investment in in startups and new companies, whether it's in the financial space FinTech space, or In the regulatory space rec tech space or the insurer tech space, institutions have brought new ideas and market faster and cheaper, and in a more productive manner, because of the cloud, right, so these, these startup organizations are born in the cloud. And because they're born in the cloud, they can bring their new idea, their new technology, their new approach their new innovation to market quickie quickly, and we've seen what that's done to accelerate innovation across the industry. I mean, four or five years ago, we're all talking about oh, the rise of the fintechs, right, they're gonna, they're gonna take down the larger institutions. And the reality of it is, is they've been additive to the larger institutions, either learning from those fintechs or acquiring those fintechs. Or partnering with those fintechs to augment the broader customer experience and products and services and value creation that they're that they're that they were taking. And now you hear these large institutions, you know, talking about wanting to operate like fintechs, right, in terms of the speed of change the speed of innovation and ability, the speed of testing and learning fast within their environments. And so they're, they're taking a page out of the FinTech book, right. And they're doing that by bringing cloud and innovation technologies into their enterprise environments. So that they can do that at scale as well. Obviously, they have other challenges around how they do that, because they've got to do that in an environment that's dealing with legacy systems. And they're doing that in a regulated regulated environment that the FinTech organizations don't necessarily have to operate in around security and compliance controls. And so larger institutions are learning how to do that faster, they're investing in cloud capabilities and services are investing in the development talent that's needed to operate and develop that way. And the idea of speed to market and speed to innovation is occurring. And we're seeing that in financial services at pace, particularly coming out of the pandemic. With that showed, that we could react fast, create collaborative and, and hybrid environments in a quick manner, do that in a safe, secure environment, within the regulatory compliance and controls that financial institutions have to operate in. That was a proof point coming out of the pandemic, that things could be done faster, but still be done in secure compliant manner. And now the push is on now coming out of the pandemic to actually show that you can do that at scale. Loraine Lawson I agree. So what's next for Microsoft financial services in the cloud or otherwise? Bill Borden Well, we're we have the luxury of building off of the core Microsoft Cloud, and, and the history and legacy of our customers who have invested in that cloud, whether it's an Azure in the infrastructure space, or, or the modern workspace with Office 365, or with our biz app space with Dynamics 365, or in our developer community with GitHub. We're leveraging new cloud services out of LinkedIn. Many of our customers have been invested in aspects of the Microsoft Cloud. And as we think about ways to take our capabilities at the Microsoft Cloud level, and create ways to extend it with unique capabilities and services for financial services. We're really excited about the retail bank offering that we initially launched with the Microsoft Cloud financial services because it shows the power of being able to deliver things like onboarding client 360 and client insights. In a much more easily consumable out of the box way, if you will, for our customers to take advantage of and build off of that. We will continue to look for opportunities to create products and services naturally, that support retail banking, and commercial banking and consumer banking and insurance and capital markets as we integrate our cloud services. And so we'll look to continue to offer those things out of the box. We will also expand on our offerings from from a global perspective as well, right now we launched in the US and Canada, the United Kingdom. And now we will be having availability in Australia, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, and the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. And we'll have plans to continue to extend our presence in many more markets and languages in the coming months. And so we're going to extend the Microsoft Cloud financial services capabilities in terms of, of, of reach and function as well as geo locations, and so we'll be super excited about that. Also a lot of reaction and excitement from our ISV and our partner community, around their ability to extend their unique value propositions, with our services in in, in the cloud. So if you can think of extending collaboration capabilities that we have naturally in our Microsoft Cloud set, a partner can actually start to build those into their application more readily out of the box, to integrate with Office 365, or to integrate with teams, for example. So that their solution built in those natural collaboration capabilities as part of the value proposition in for our customers who have invested in the Microsoft Cloud for financial services and have invested in the common set of security, compliance and control structures that we built around our cloud structure. They're excited to know that as they work with partners that build into our cloud, they have the assurance and the effectiveness of knowing that those partners have built towards a common set of control structures that they've already agreed to, and already have proven out with their relationship and working with Microsoft. So there's the advantages of them working with partners that are building into our cloud capabilities. And the advantage of the integration of Microsoft plus the partners as part of what they're building in their architectures together, which again, leads to time to value the notion of getting capabilities out to market and more quickly, the notion of being able to expand into new products and services, the notion to think about how to, you know, take advantage of new business opportunities in different geographies, all at scale, and that scale driven by cloud services and capabilities. And I'll underline that we're doing that in a philosophy of knowing that this will be you know, in a in a, in a hybrid environment with regards to on prem and cloud, and it'll be in a multi cloud environment. And we're building our capabilities to work in an interoperable way, knowing that that's the architecture that our customers are going to be investing in over the long run. Loraine Lawson: You’ve been listening to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. Thank you for your time, and be sure to visit us at Bank automation news.com for more automation news. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Please don’t hesitate to rate this podcast on your podcast platform of choice.

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