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How Banking Institutions Can Catch Up On The Digital Curve With Microsoft

Microsoft wants to make traditional banking a thing of the past with its customizable financial services platform.

Asia Pacific is poised to become the most connected market by 2021, and business processes in the region are being digitalized at an increasing rate. Customers are looking to move away from monolithic technology solutions that create disconnected data siloes or require expensive custom extensibility frameworks.

As digital transformation begins to affect all aspects of business operations in the financial service industry , we are seeing growing investment in FinTech globally, and especially in Asia where it has surpassed the U.S. in FinTech investment in 2016.

Microsoft believes that success in the coming decade will depend on how well financial service providers transform “business as usual” with technology to create new value. They must embrace new business models that combine agility and security in dynamic tension, with trust at the center. As FinTech continues to revolutionize the way people transact from front to back end, it is Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

Customer engagement as top priority for APAC business leaders

The financial industry in Asia Pacific is set to transform, with more customers doing their banking online. But many legacy banks are still lagging behind, not knowing where to start when it comes to digitising their services and creating more value for their customers. This could potentially be dangerous to banks, as customers opt out of visiting physical branches and engaging fintech-enabled platforms to meet their financial needs.

Enter Microsoft’s Dynamic 365. Lisa Halim, ‎Business Group head at Microsoft Dynamics Asia Pacific, says that it is time for companies in Asia Pacific to go digital.

Lisa Halim

“According to the Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Study, 80 percent of the business leaders in Asia Pacific believe they need to transform to a digital business, and that customer engagement is top priority to enable future growth,” she said.

“As consumers become even savvier due to instant access to the web and social media, it is important for businesses to deliver personalised experiences to customers,”

Microsoft’s data and process-driven Dynamics 365 solutions are able to help financial services players by doing the following:

Provide employees immediate access to information at their fingertips, so they can deal with customers with lightning speed
Monitor branch traffic patterns or a customer’s account activity; identify and address problems before they begin to affect the customer relationship
Streamline systems with dashboards and reports generated by Microsoft’s business analytics tool Power BI. “Everything from income data, profit and loss, and balance sheets, constantly monitoring the health of the business,”
By using Microsoft Social Engagement, banks can recognise customer’s issues and direct them to the right person who can make the change.

“We’re also supporting employees by providing relationship insights by using integrated data intelligence to help guide their daily work,”

says Halim.

“For instance, we help employees manage email communication, such as delivery scheduling, or choose the most effective message template, with recommendations based on the organisation’s previous email history,”

she continued. These features are guided by artificial intelligence and help financial services providers make smarter and faster decisions.

Dynamic 365’s success with Metro Bank

Microsoft has had tremendous results with Metro Bank, a leading financial institution in the United Kingdom. Dynamic 365 has eliminated the long waits, complex rules, confusing processes, and barrage of marketing offers. With nearly 100 percent year-on-year growth, Metro Bank is succeeding – but not by serving customers, by creating “fans, said Halim.

In order to stay relevant, and be innovative and engaging in the digital transformation age, Metro Bank monitored branch traffic patterns or a customer’s account activity through Dynamics 365, thereby increasing the speed of business. It also engaged Dynamics 365’s social media monitoring to control brand perception.

Using the software’s data-driven platform, Dynamics 365 for Marketing allowed Metro Bank to avoid the mass marketing communications that are a common frustration among banking customers. Metro Bank’s goal is to provide exactly the right information customers need at exactly the right time, via the channel that’s most convenient to the customer.

CEO Craig Donaldson is a satisfied customer.

Craig Donaldson

“When we launched our mobile app, we got live updates on mobile banking data and as customers requested the activation code, if we saw customers go past five activation attempts we called them to help them through it, which earned us great feedback,”