Accelerating financial services transformation with AI

The power of generative AI combined with rich industry data is transforming financial services by enabling professionals to quickly access and synthesize critical insights for faster, more efficient, and better-informed decision-making.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

This powerful advantage is now available with Meeting Prep for Financial Services (preview), the newest addition to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and an innovation from Microsoft’s long-term strategic partnership with LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group). The new app, built and optimized for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, offers deep links and interoperability with LSEG’s next-generation data and analytics workflow solution, LSEG Workspace, to augment the workflow experience.

Meeting Prep for Financial Services empowers investment bankers and other professionals in client-facing roles by helping to save time preparing for client meetings, improve client engagement and decision-making, and streamline client communications. For professionals in firms with a Microsoft Teams license and LSEG Workspace license, the app fosters collaborative workflows and boosts productivity. Generally available in December 2024 and now in public preview, Meeting Prep for Financial Services is an important milestone in the LSEG and Microsoft partnership launched in 2022 to jointly develop new products and services for data and analytics.

“We are thrilled with the positive reaction from our customers, who have highlighted the significant time savings and efficiency benefits they are experiencing with Meeting Prep for Financial Services. By integrating market-leading data and analytics from LSEG Workspace with Microsoft’s generative AI capabilities, we are empowering financial professionals to prepare for client meetings more effectively and make more informed decisions.”

Nej D’Jelal, Group Head, LSEG Workspace Platform

How our financial services customers and partners are advancing with AI

Innovation is happening in every corner of financial services as organizations engage with Microsoft and our global partners. Such innovation requires a strong foundation of security, privacy, and trust, which is why we place special emphasis on safeguarding data, taking robust privacy measures, and committing to responsible AI principles. Security is a top company-wide priority for Microsoft, and our Secure Future Initiative reflects our commitment to continually advancing the built-in security of our products and services.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services offers this foundation with services and solutions tailored to the industry, empowering firms to achieve impactful business outcomes quickly—whether transforming the customer experience, empowering employees, managing risk and compliance, or modernizing core systems. Organizations can drive innovation and improve resilience by taking advantage of fit-for-purpose platform services. And with Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered analytics platform, firms can unite their data, improve collaboration, and reduce the cost and effort of AI development, while simplifying governance and enhancing security.

Transforming the customer experience

The importance of data in customer experiences is magnified when viewed through the lens of the customer journey—in every place, time, and channel that a customer interacts with their financial institution. To deliver better service and more meaningful interactions, firms need to create seamless, consistent experiences and provide a complete view of the relationship.

A great example is how Microsoft and BlackRock are partnering to build next-generation solutions for the company’s Aladdin investment management platform, which runs entirely on Microsoft Azure. BlackRock last year launched a new generative AI tool for its private markets platform, and is now launching the new Aladdin Copilot, which surfaces answers instantly to support key business decisions and enable better decision-making.

Many other firms are reshaping how they deliver experiences, products, and services through generative AI. ERGO Insurance has revolutionized its customer service in just four months using an AI Virtual Agent powered by Azure, developed by EBO. Virgin Money has developed an award-winning virtual assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to enhance the omnichannel customer experience. First National Bank has improved customer communications with Microsoft Copilot for Sales, ensuring client responses reflect understanding of their requests. And CommBank is using generative AI to deliver personalized customer experiences and help protect against fraud, scams, and financial abuse.

Empowering employees

With the right communications and collaboration tools, employees can be dramatically more effective in addressing business needs and servicing customers. The first and often most powerful way to benefit from generative AI is to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, which recently launched a new wave of features as well as enhancements to Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps. A recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester, commissioned by Microsoft, projects 112 to 457% projected ROI using Copilot for three years, and 30% reduction in new-hire onboarding time.¹

Beyond Copilot, customers are using Azure OpenAI Service to build custom agents and generative AI applications. These also offer significant ROI. Another recent Forrester TEI study in the financial services and insurance sector, also commissioned by Microsoft, suggests that organizations deploying solutions on Azure OpenAI Service can expect increased average revenue per client of 3 to 7% by year 3, and a time savings in content generation efficiency of 30 to 60%.²

Across the industry, our customers are realizing important productivity benefits in AI innovation. For example, Moody’s launched a custom enterprise copilot that is enhancing productivity and innovation for its 14,000 employees, which they launched in less than 30 days.

“Financial institutions are confronting the demand for immediate insights amidst an overwhelming surge of data. Microsoft’s Azure and generative AI solutions are pivotal in navigating this challenge by simplifying and democratizing access through copilots, enabling our customers to process an unprecedented volume of data with unparalleled speed.”

Nick Reed, Chief Product Officer, Moody’s Analytics

Elsewhere, financial advisors at Hargreaves Lansdown are saving two to three hours per week on average, using new AI-powered tools to complete client documentation four times faster than before. Using Azure OpenAI Service, AXA developed its AXA Secure GPT platform in three months, applying generative AI responsibly and with high data safety. And staff at Akbank are saving three minutes per customer support interaction with a new chatbot that can search 10,000 records in seconds.

Managing risk and compliance

As financial services firms rely more on technology to operate and innovate, it is increasingly critical to ensure that systems meet regulatory requirements and operate with the reliability, resilience, and security the industry demands.

The growing reliance on technology has prompted regulatory action around the world, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the European Union, a regulation designed to improve the stability and security of the industry. With DORA and other key efforts, Microsoft is actively engaged with regulators and is focused on helping customers achieve smooth and comprehensive compliance. This includes participation in consortia such as the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), where we are joining other industry leaders in the development of a groundbreaking AI governance framework for financial institutions.

Technology also plays a key role in regulatory compliance. Based on the Azure landing zone—a secure, scalable cloud foundation tailored for compliance needs—we are introducing a new FSI landing zone. Available in November 2024, this infrastructure-as-code provides the baseline governance, resilience, security, automation, and prescriptive guidance needed to help financial services organizations and our industry partners meet the strict, non-negotiable compliance requirements of the industry.

The move to the cloud can likewise accelerate more effective risk management. Bank of Montreal, for example, has migrated its market risk management platform to Azure and realized a sixfold reduction in analysis time, a doubling of speed in job time, and a 30% cost savings. And Belgian bank Belfius has deployed the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform to assess risks, meet regulatory standards, and more quickly identify unusual behaviors.

Enhancing security

On the security front, financial services organizations are among the most targeted in the world. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the escalating cost of cybercrime will reach USD10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from USD3 trillion a decade ago.³ The increasingly dangerous threat landscape compels firms to better safeguard critical systems, enhance data protection, and maintain compliance with a host of regulations.

To help cyber defense teams work more effectively amid chronic talent shortages, Microsoft Copilot for Security empowers analysts to rapidly assess an organization’s security posture and create actionable insights and solutions at much greater speed than current approaches. At Intesa Sanpaolo Group, Copilot for Security is speeding the work of threat hunters and empowering junior staff to ramp up dramatically faster. And at Barclays, Microsoft’s security solutions are helping to better detect, investigate, respond to, and protect against security threats.

Modernizing core systems

The promise of AI is motivating many institutions to rethink their reliance on legacy systems and migrate mission-critical workloads to the cloud, while also adopting a modern data and analytics platform like Microsoft Fabric. With the significant AI and agent investments we’re seeing across our customer base, the need for a robust data estate strategy is even more critical.

The collaboration among Microsoft, our partner Quantexa, and European bank Novo Banco is a great example of data estate modernization in the era of AI—combining the power of the Quantexa Decision Intelligence Platform with Microsoft Fabric’s advanced analytics capabilities.

Modernization also delivers important benefits in agility, resilience, compliance, and costs. In Singapore, CapitaLand Investment has moved to a unified data platform that streamlined data operations across all business units, saving over SGD1 million in operational costs and more than 10,000 worker-days per year. Likewise, Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) has upgraded its application infrastructure to Azure, which has been key to quadrupling their client base, and has reduced the time to deploy new services from three months to as little as one day. And Zavarovalnica Triglav is reimagining insurance workflows in Slovenia with automated responses and smart rerouting of customer inquiries, reducing the need for manual intervention by around half for certain requests.

Looking ahead

As these and so many other examples demonstrate, AI makes it possible to innovate across the business while maintaining trust with customers, clients, regulators, and within the organization. Microsoft and our partners are poised with both solutions and services on which the industry can depend, and we look forward to continuing the journey with every customer.

See Microsoft Learn for more information on Meeting Prep for Financial Services, including guidance on how to participate in the public preview.
Explore refreshed documentation for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, the scalable, industry-tailored platform that helps financial services organizations unlock business value and deepen customer relationships.
Read our blog, 3 ways Microsoft is helping the financial industry prepare for new DORA regulations, to learn more about how Microsoft is helping the financial services industry prepare for DORA.