Modern device strategy: Financial Services in a hybrid world

In today's shifting economic climate, Microsoft is focused on helping organizations in every industry use technology to overcome challenges and emerge stronger. That's why I'm pleased to kick off a series of posts exploring how Surface provides the best devices for the modern cloud.

Let's start with the financial services industry's unrivaled demands for timely, accurate information across global markets. Consider that Reuters transmits more than 276,000 prices per day for foreign exchange spot rates alone. Key people can log in from anywhere. And, like it or not, hybrid work is here to stay. So how do you make it work?

Hybrid work requires more sophisticated and secure devices, communications, and collaboration tools to empower employees to work and connect with colleagues and customers from anywhere.

Microsoft Surface for Business offers a versatile device portfolio with industry-leading security to empower financial services professionals to work from anywhere while delivering more personalized and differentiated customer experiences. Here are a few examples of financial roles that can benefit from Surface devices:

• Retail bank associates
  
• Wealth advisors
  
• Investment analysts
  
• Financial services teams
  

To provide the best customer experience, companies need to harness data and use technology to predict future needs and serve customers in a way they did not even expect. Let's see what that looks like for critical roles across financial services.

Retail bank associates

Loan officers who process home improvement loans at your local bank face increasingly knowledgeable customers who demand more personalization and consistent experience when shopping for the best deal. These frontline workers may struggle to access apps and data away from their desks.

Top challenges in such a role can include:

• Providing a personalized experience for customers
  
• Communicating information clearly and on time
  
• Making a good impression on new and existing clients
  

Solution: Surface Go 3

Customer service is your priority, but it's not easy when you don't have information within reach. Provide branch workers with premium devices that project your brand image when engaging with customers and ensure high performance when running LOB apps.

With Surface Go 3, branch workers can:

• See and show promotional images and videos to customers in brilliant detail with the high-resolution touch screen
  
• Tackle touch-and-ink tasks with Surface Pen, facilitating real-time signatures with digital inking
  
• Reduce customer wait times by accessing critical banking apps from anywhere, eliminating the need to return to a desktop PC to get work done
  

Wealth advisors

As high-net-worth individuals access most financial services online, they demand the highest customer service and professionalism from wealth advisors. To keep pace with emerging technology while growing their client base, wealth advisors routinely face complex challenges every day, including:

• Collaborating with colleagues to determine the best financial plans for clients
  
• Staying productive when working remotely while accessing information in real-time
  
• Making a good impression on new and existing clients
  

Solution: Surface Pro 8 LTE

Help clients plan their financial futures with Surface Pro 8. Enhance customer experience and increase client loyalty by going to your clients' places of work or home. Connect more impactfully with versatile form factors, built-in LTE connectivity, and protection by the best modern security and manageability platform from Microsoft (Surface powered by M365).

With Surface Pro 8 LTE, wealth advisors can:

• Run critical financial software and productivity apps concurrently with 11th Gen Intel® Core processor enabling superior performance without sacrificing mobility
  
• Securely connect with colleagues and clients when working from anywhere.
  
• Protect sensitive data to help ensure safe, private, compliant interactions with clients.
  

Investment analysts

As specialists in their field, investment analysts face hurdles unique to their role with the speed and volume of information that needs to be processed, including:

• Identifying investments with the potential to maximize returns.
  
• Creating well-researched advice and complex financial models
  
• Communicating investment plans to colleagues and clients
  

Solution: Surface Laptop Studio

Analysts can help determine the best investments on a Surface Laptop Studio capable of meeting the high compute demands of business-critical software and complex financial models.

With Surface Laptop Studio, analysts can:

• Run data models from customers' offices and walk them through an interactive portfolio presentation at a natural angle in Stage mode.
  
• Leverage the versatility and unparalleled performance of the most powerful Surface device. Its 11th gen Intel Core i5 and i7 h-class processors, coupled with your choice of discrete graphics and up to 32GB RAM, lets you handle the heaviest workloads.
  
• Type with precision and comfort on the full-size keyboard and work until lights out with up to 18 hours of battery life 1. NVIDIA® RTX™ A2000 laptop GPU allow analysts and data scientists to tackle their entire data science workflow on the go.
  

Financial services teams

Leading economists have described the move to working from home as the most significant shock to labor markets in decades. Navigating the complexities of Hybrid work is a top priority for many organizations across the financial industry. Companies are facing a myriad of challenges, including:

• Connecting with colleagues in dispersed branches
  
• Modernizing customer experience and advisory services
  
• Collaborating on business development plans and documents on a screen viewable for large groups
  

Solution: Surface Hub

To drive more inclusive meetings for hybrid teams, the Surface Hub 2S is a powerful meetings platform certified for Microsoft Teams.

With Surface Hub 2S, financial services teams can:

• Collaborate seamlessly with the AI-powered Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera2 that auto frames the video feed for remote participants, giving them the best possible view of the room.
  
• Share ideas using the real-time pen and inking capabilities to whiteboard or markup
  Office 365 documents
  
• View a full range of facial expressions and body language via 4K quality images on a large, high-resolution screen in a 50" or 85" form factor.
  

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft Cloud solutions help organizations work better and smarter by connecting people and teams across every role and function and externally to customers and partners. Companies can grow their business by capitalizing on three patterns of work: enabling hybrid work, bringing collaborative experiences directly into the flow of work, and creating a digital employee experience.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services helps you deploy solutions across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform. Get started today: Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services | Microsoft

Conclusion

Here's a quick summary of how Surface devices and Microsoft 365 help financial services companies enable hybrid work while mitigating risk:

To recap, whatever your role or workload, Surface for Business has the right device for you to power the full stack of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services solutions.

Register today: Surface MTC Session for Financial Services in Amsterdam

• How to realize optimal security within a Financial Services organization via the 'Chip-to-Cloud' security.
• How to optimize the costs, thanks to improved manageability and increased productivity within the organization
• Understand the challenges of hybrid work in the Financial Services sector and how can Surface help
  

Join us at Ignite

Learn from product experts and partners and create connections from around the world

• The Ignite Digital experience is free and open to all customers and partners worldwide.
  

References

1. Battery life varies significantly based on usage, network and feature configuration, signal strength, settings and other factors. See aka.ms/SurfaceBatteryPerformance for details.

2. Sold separately.

Continue reading...