How Microsoft Services helps banks digitally enable new partnerships
Banks and financial services organizations face increasing pressure to succeed through partnerships that span their organizational boundaries. Beyond long-standing relationships with traditional intermediaries, successful banking organizations today need to work in an agile and secure way with partner organizations in an emerging range of new scenarios. Examples of such newly important partnerships include those with:
- Industry consortiums, regulators, consultants and others for whom secure collaboration in the creation of documents, distributed co-working, and conferencing are among the key capabilities that facilitate a fruitful partnership.
- Fintechs that innovate and offer services complementary to a bank’s own when given the chance to interface with bank systems. Several banks have started encouraging these partnerships by facilitating “hackathons” to identify innovative opportunities for leveraging their core banking platforms.
- Market participants in markets where distributed ledger technology (i.e., blockchain) has the potential to define new markets or replace existing exchanges or middlemen.
- Vendors of major assets financed by banks where new devices attached to those assets track their usage patterns and location. Data provided in these scenarios may provide banks greater security over assets and may also enable new financing constructs more closely linked to asset use or value depreciation.
The Microsoft cloud is unique in offering the potential to enable a full range of capabilities to support these banking industry partnership scenarios. Microsoft Services helps banks envision these opportunities and define their roadmap, addressing aspects such as:
- Protecting and reporting the use of information including documents, email, and other content when shared outside the bank’s traditional boundaries and allowing the bank to revoke access to previously shared information when the status of a partnership changes.
- Offering secure well-controlled access to interfaces into their systems using Microsoft cloud API management capabilities in a way that encourages discovery and innovation.
- Accelerating their efforts to enable new partnerships or consortiums using blockchain technologies available on the Microsoft cloud.
- Leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios with Microsoft cloud technologies that allow the bank and asset vendor to partner in offering new asset-backed financing solutions.
