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 geo locations.” 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.”