4 ways Microsoft Copilot empowers financial services employees

In the rapidly evolving landscape of financial services, staying ahead of the curve with technological innovation is not simply an advantage—it’s a necessity. That’s why financial services firms have been among the most aggressive of any industry sector to embrace generative AI.

When 70% of Microsoft 365 Copilot users report that the integration of generative AI into their everyday applications and tasks makes them more productive,¹ firms can see how AI can fundamentally revolutionize their businesses—starting by empowering the people who keep their companies running.

Explore Microsoft 365 Copilot solutions

Historically, technology innovations have often not focused foremost on the needs of the average worker. Rather, they were often focused on empowering executives or driving loftier business goals such as enhancing competitiveness and profitability or powering new products and services. Generative AI is distinct in that it is tailored to benefit employees first.

Helping banks and other financial institutions take full advantage of AI is central to our work at Microsoft. In the past two years, we’ve worked intensively with firms around the world to explore new avenues of AI innovation, with use cases that span an incredible range of opportunities. None have been more noteworthy than employee empowerment.

For many users, this happens initially with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is embedded into apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams to integrate AI directly into everyday work tasks.

Copilot removes drudgery and empowers employees

When every employee has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster, the sky is the limit on innovation. And it couldn’t come at a better time. According to the Microsoft 2025 Annual Work Trend Index, 53% of leaders say their company’s productivity needs to increase, yet 80% of the global workforce reports lacking the time or energy to do their job.¹

This “capacity gap” is why 82% of leaders expect to use digital labor to expand their workforce in the next 12 to 18 months. For many, the journey starts with Copilot and related cloud solutions that remove the drudgery of work and help people do the same work better and faster.

4 ways Copilot is delivering immediate impact in financial services

Enhanced productivity is the broad term for an important set of benefits that generative AI can deliver. For financial services firms, the specific use cases and benefits span many areas but we will concentrate here on four in particular: summarization, content creation, process optimization, and real-time insights.

1. Summarization
One of the most valuable features of Copilot is summarization—the ability to instantly produce a customized summary of anything from a recently conducted meeting to a transcript of a customer conversation, to summaries of whitepapers and PowerPoint presentations. In a fast-paced environment where analysts, advisors, and other professionals juggle multiple tasks, having a tool that can immediately extract key takeaways and follow-up actions is invaluable.

A good example is the experience of Hargreaves Lansdown, a leading United Kingdom financial services company that was early to embrace Copilot. Until recently, advisors had to manually take notes for customer meetings and later transfer them into a branded document, a process that could take up to four hours. With Copilot summarization and Microsoft Teams Premium, the process is being cut to as little as one hour through the automatic generation of meeting summaries, documentation, and action items.

Copilot not only speeds summarization, “it’s also good quality information,” says Systems Operations Manager Daniel Toman. “We know nothing is being missed.”

2. Content creation
The process of drafting emails, building presentations, and writing important client documents can be time-consuming and frustrating. Copilot eases that burden by identifying relevant source materials, using natural language processing to create messages and documents, and pulling information from across the Microsoft Graph (an API that connects all Microsoft 365 data, documents, and users.) The benefits for financial services include improved client engagement, scalable workflows, and AI-powered insights.

Content creation is delivering major benefits to Bank of Queensland (BQQ), which adopted Copilot to enhance collaboration and productivity. It has helped decrease the time required to draft internal manuals by 99%, marketing content by 88%, and human resource document drafts by 75%. Those gains are credited with improved customer service and operational efficiency—plus greater innovation in a competitive market.

“Copilot puts the power in the hands of the employee to be able to find efficiency.”

—Hayley Watson, Head of Enterprise Capability, BOQ

And to offer another customer example, in the United Kingdom, Floww, a financial infrastructure platform provider, increased employee efficiency by up to 20%, using Copilot to process massive quantities of data spanning technical documents, regulatory compliance requirements, and financial information, then condensing and delivering reports in easily accessible, shared formats.

3. Process optimization
Too many important processes in financial services are still dependent on manual tasks that can slow productivity and drain resources. Copilot solves this by automating processes and enhancing collaboration. The net benefits for firms include streamlined operations, fewer errors, and more time for employees to focus on high-value work.

For example, Dutch wealth management firm Van Lanschot Kempen wanted to help advisors focus more on personal connections with clients and found that too much time was being spent on unautomated tasks. So, they enlisted Copilot to improve common workflows and processes. Copilot now helps save them time by drafting emails (in multiple languages) in response to prompts, taking notes in meetings, and identifying and automatically assigning action points. An added benefit is that it reduces the language barrier and increases the quality of emails and documents.

“Having to take notes and structure action points and recaps accounted for around 40% of my time, Copilot is now my assistant during and after meetings.”

—Johanna Albert, Digital Adoption Specialist

Elsewhere, LGT, a Liechtenstein-based international private banking and asset management group, is using Copilot in their legal and compliance departments—for instance, to simplify reviews of lengthy contract documents. What used to take up to four hours can now be done in about 30 minutes. And global payments platform Paysafe cut the amount of time spent building technical documentation by up to 50%, automating meeting documentation, information retrieval, and document creation.

4. Real-time insights
Copilot is redefining how financial services professionals work by providing real-time insights that empower employees and enhance decision-making. Imagine, for example, a mortgages operation manager who needs to ensure efficient loan processing while maintaining compliance and optimizing customer satisfaction. Throughout the process, Copilot instantly retrieves and summarizes critical data, improving both speed and accuracy. Across firms and roles, real-time insights help with everything from research and predictive analysis to collaboration, workflow automation, and decision-making.

The scope of the transformation this represents is reflected in Microsoft’s strategic partnership with Moody’s to co-create new products and services for research and risk assessment. Built on a combination of Moody’s robust data and analytical capabilities and the power and scale of Azure OpenAI Service, the partnership creates innovative offerings that enhance insights into corporate intelligence and risk assessment. One early offering is a new copilot, “Moody’s CoPilot,” deployed to Moody’s 14,000 global employees, which helps drive firm-wide innovation and enhance employee productivity in a safe and secure digital sandbox.

Beyond Microsoft 365 Copilot: A new breed of financial services agents

Microsoft 365 Copilot is really just the start. Microsoft also offers a range of Copilot solutions tailored for businesses sectors, including Microsoft Copilot for Finance, which connects to financial systems such as Dynamics 365 and other leading financial management platforms to assist with tasks like analysis, reconciliation, collections, and communications.

For firms who want to do more, Microsoft Copilot Studio makes it easy to build custom AI agents without requiring extensive coding expertise. It also includes a powerful new Researcher Agent that helps with complex, multi-step research. It delivers deep insights with greater quality and accuracy than previously possible to advance important tasks like market analysis, opportunity identification, and key reporting.

Set the stage for new waves of AI innovation

Employees who use copilots are not just more productive, they’re more likely to be engaged and innovative. For many, their embrace of AI will become career accelerators. Empowered employees will help drive the reinvention of even the most established firms, and make endless contributions to the upstarts and even those we can’t imagine today.

As the rapid evolution of AI continues, we will soon see the adoption of new classes of AI agents that won’t simply provide assistance but will execute tasks and orchestrate action autonomously. The future is approaching rapidly: our research suggests that global business leaders expect their teams will be training (41%) and managing (36%) AI agents within five years.¹

Soon, human-agent teams will upend the org chart, and every employee will become an agent boss. Now is the time to get them up and running.

Learn more

Visit Microsoft for financial services to learn more about how Microsoft empowers financial services organizations to achieve more.
Learn more about using Copilot in Financial Services and download the Financial Services scenarios kit.