Ushering in the new era of financial services AI with partner-built agents

Generative AI is becoming more integrated into the workforce, providing organizations with specific data sets, relevant insights, and increased productivity. It can boost bank productivity by 22 to 30% and drive a 6% increase in revenue.¹ However, only 31% of banks have successfully moved more than half of their workloads to the cloud.² To utilize AI benefits, financial services must overcome barriers to adopting the public cloud. Microsoft is addressing these challenges with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, offering a secure, compliant, scalable infrastructure configured to support financial services, thereby unlocking new possibilities for knowledge work and automating routine tasks. 

Microsoft and our partners are pivotal in AI adoption in financial services, offering tailored solutions. This collaborative approach harnesses the power of generative AI to provide deeper levels of real-time analysis, decision-making support, streamlined operations, and potential new revenue opportunities, enabling financial services organizations to respond more swiftly to market changes and customer needs. 

One of the key components of this collaborative approach is the use of generative AI assistants, also known as agents. These agents are designed to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher-level, strategic activities. By using these agents, organizations can boost productivity, reduce operational costs, and improve decision-making processes. Agents developed through our partners can be integrated seamlessly with existing systems, enhancing customer engagement, and streamlining employee experiences. 

Enabling customer AI and cloud adoption 

Microsoft partners play a crucial role in mitigating the blockers the financial services industry faces as it moves to adopt generative AI. By helping customers implement their proprietary solutions and agents on Cloud for Financial Services, partners enhance the overall value of the Microsoft partner network sector-wide. Partner solutions can help improve productivity and support a company’s ability to adopt and benefit from AI initiatives, including those using Microsoft technology and that of other partners in the financial services sector. 

Financial institutions often encounter compliance challenges migrating applications and data, struggling to create policy that is secure and compliant. Microsoft addresses these challenges with the financial services industry (FSI) landing zone, part of Cloud for Financial Services and an industry-specific extension of Microsoft Azure landing zones.  

Additional challenges to AI adoption include connecting legacy systems, fragmented data sources, and integrating new technologies with existing infrastructure. Microsoft Fabric enables customers to connect to data in place , on-premises, or on other cloud providers, making that data AI-ready and easily accessible to applications. Key investments are being rolled out to meet additional requirements from financial services organizations such as private endpoints, customer managed keys, and data governance capabilities—helping to create a unified and compliant data platform for AI workloads. 

Microsoft partners extend the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services to better address each of these concerns by providing powerful solutions that reduce risk across the ecosystem, identify new opportunities for innovation, and decrease time to market while maintaining high levels of security and compliance.  

Partners who are evolving the industry 

As financial institutions shift from building their own solutions to adopting top-tier cloud and IT services, the solutions and capabilities provided by partners become increasingly important. Industry-specific agents will occupy a pivotal space in delivering data-driven value and new capabilities across AI workloads.

Microsoft works with many of the most trusted technology partners in the financial services industry, including Finastra, KX, LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), Personetics, and dozens of others to help deliver powerful agents for customers across the sector. Agents being developed and released by these partners will help their customers with data analysis, detecting suspicious activity, conducting customer research, gaining investment and portfolio insights, completing customer risk assessments, preparing for meetings, and more. 

There are multiple business areas in which promising agents are already generating significant benefits. Customer-facing employees like financial advisors, call center employees, and other service representatives can benefit from the addition of AI agents to their numbers. Under the supervision of staff, these agents can handle high volumes of diverse customer scenarios while elevating the more complex issues to representatives. Generative AI can also accelerate productivity for knowledge workers by creating presentations, summarizing meetings, and drawing conclusions from complex reports.  

Driving innovation for a diverse array of customer scenarios

Finastra’s commitment to driving innovation in the financial services industry through the development of innovative agents based on Microsoft technology was recently highlighted during Microsoft Ignite. The company is using generative AI to enhance efficiency, productivity, customer experience, and risk management, as well as optimize financial operations.  

KX and Microsoft are exploring how to integrate KX’s generative AI agent with Microsoft platforms. The solution will use generative AI to provide deeper insights, more accurate predictions, and improved decision-making processes for financial institutions.  

Collaboration between LSEG and Microsoft recently led to the development of Financial Meeting Prep, a new app within Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. This app, optimized for Microsoft Teams, integrates with LSEG Workspace to enhance data and analytics workflows. For those organizations with the requisite Microsoft and LSEG licensing, it helps client-facing professionals save time on meeting preparation, improve client engagement and decision-making, and streamline communications. It will soon be available as an agent within Microsoft 365 Copilot for even greater convenience and functionality. 

Personetics uses advanced AI technology to analyze banking transactions and provide actionable insights and product advice. By examining patterns and trends within financial data, Personetics helps financial institutions optimize operations, enhance customer experiences, improve engagement, and make informed decisions. The upcoming integration with the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem will allow banking users to seamlessly access these insights and optimize business decisions, without disrupting their workflow.  

How Microsoft is empowering partners across financial services  

As the financial services sector continues to innovate, Microsoft solutions like Azure AI Foundry can support partners as they push boundaries and explore integrating AI. Azure AI Foundry is a new, consolidated platform designed to help build, deploy, and manage AI solutions. It supports the entire lifecycle of AI development, from machine learning to generative AI models. Azure AI Foundry also integrates with popular developer tools like GitHub, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Microsoft Copilot Studio, making it accessible and efficient for a wide variety of developers. It also includes an SDK and a portal for enterprise management, allowing partners to design and scale AI applications while helping to ensure safety, reliability, and performance. 

Copilot Studio and Microsoft Fabric can also aid in this process. Copilot Studio is a graphical, low-code tool for creating and managing AI-powered agents, including building automation with Microsoft Power Automate and extending Microsoft 365 Copilot with enterprise data and scenarios. It allows users to connect to various data sources using prebuilt or custom plugins, making it accessible even to those without extensive technical backgrounds.

Facilitating rapid prototyping

One of the solution’s standout features is the ability to facilitate rapid prototyping by allowing users to quickly create and test conversational agents, automate business processes, and integrate with various data sources using prebuilt and custom plugins. Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end analytics and data platform designed to facilitate data movement, processing, ingestion, transformation, real-time event routing, and report building, helps Microsoft deliver the broad data ecosystem of partners across financial services on one platform. Reusable building blocks for professional coders, such as components that read financial 10-Ks, small language models, and a natural language query interface, can provide targeted, industry-specific capabilities.  

Ultimately, the integration of generative AI and the support of Microsoft partners represent a potential transformative shift in how the financial services sector operates. By embracing these technologies, organizations can achieve greater agility, improve risk management, and deliver superior value to their clients. As the financial landscape continues to evolve, the adoption of generative AI will undoubtedly play a crucial role in shaping the future of the industry. The next big idea, that agent that changes the game once more, could still be forming in someone’s mind right now.  

Get started and learn more 

For partners looking for a reason to join that conversation, the timing couldn’t be better. 

• For industry-specific insights into generative AI, check out the session Accelerate AI Innovation with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services from Microsoft Ignite 2024.  

• For a deeper look at Microsoft Copilot and the future of agents in financial services, refer to the Empowering the Financial Services Partner Ecosystem with Generative AI session from Ignite 2024. 

• For more information on Financial Meeting Prep, including how to access and install it, see the documentation on Microsoft Learn 

• If you’re interested in building agents of your own, the Overview of Copilot Studio agent builder on Microsoft Learn is a great place to start. 

¹Top 10 banking trends for 2024

²Banking Cloud Altimeter Volume 4 | Mainframe Migration | Accenture 

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog