Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 documentation. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.
Overview
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services provides capabilities to manage financial services data at scale and makes it easier for financial services organizations to improve their customer experience, coordinate engagement, and drive operational efficiency.
By bringing together capabilities from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services expedites a financial services organization's ability to achieve its digital transformation.
Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 2021 release wave 2
Investment areas
Retail banking data model
A dedicated banking data model hosted in Microsoft Dataverse captures new dimensions, such as financial information, groups and relationships, and life moments.
To help banks take advantage of the benefits of CRM quickly, with their business model supported out of the box, we're introducing extensions to Common Data Model that are customized for retail banking scenarios.
These changes will accelerate adoption of Dynamics 365 solutions, while also ensuring that processes and measures available out of the box are consistent and relevant for their business processes.
Collaboration Manager
Collaboration Manager for Loans in Microsoft Teams helps your team accelerate the lending process with automation and collaboration tools to reduce time from application to signing. The app lets you collaborate with meetings, customer bookings, notes, files, and approvals, all of which are attached to loan records.
Collaboration Manager for Loans can help your organization with:
- Lending automation: Streamline your business processes.
- Cross-team collaboration: Empower your team.
- Communications: Schedule and manage virtual or in-person appointments and message internal teams.
Banking customer engagement
The solution, designed specifically for retail banking, enables agents at the bank to instantly connect and engage with customers with a customer 360-degree view. This view offers relevant financial information, banking segmentation, and likelihood to churn. It's powered by purpose-built AI models for banking, via Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Contextual information empowers a customer service representative (CSR) to quickly resolve issues and drive toward better outcomes, increasing customer satisfaction and agent productivity.
Unified customer profile
With changing customer expectations, retail banks are constantly required to enhance their customer experience and to meet the customers where they are while maintaining a personalized experience and efficient, professional service.
Because of data silos in the bank, relationship managers lack consolidated visibility into customer information, characteristics, financial history, and intelligent insights. This limits their ability to provide personalized experiences, and they're likely to miss growth opportunities.
With a unified customer profile, relationship managers can gain a complete view of the customer to reach better outcomes through personalized experience, facilitate cross-sell and upsell, and increase customer retention and loyalty.
Customer intelligence
In the current banking world, bank agents provide services to many customers. They're required to communicate, advise, and provide information based on a deep understanding of the customer’s financial strength via holdings, assets, and liabilities, including the customer’s actions, life moments, and an overview of their personal and business relationships with other people connected to the bank. This information about the customer is stored in the bank across multiple separate modules: sales, services, marketing, and operational systems. To access all this information, the bank agent must search several systems that often contain data that is incomplete, inaccurate, and isolated.
Customer intelligence unifies important, relevant, and accurate customer information across multiple sources via Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. This empowers the agent to engage with customers with relevant insights that combine demographic information, financial measures, and attitudes to form financial segments and AI models. Combined, these insights help agents to quickly understand the customer.
Customer onboarding
In today’s digitized world, banks are offering their applicants the use of online channels to receive information on their accounts and keep track of their finances.
When applying for a loan, applicants usually reach out to the bank via the official website or mobile application as a first step to explore available options and evaluate their fit. Tailoring the right loan quickly and easily can make the difference between an engaged customer and one who turns to another lender. Allowing the applicant to start the loan application journey online, providing initial information to the bank, creates an opportunity to offer relevant information and capture the applicant interest in real time. However, in some cases this process is abandoned midway, leaving the application information incomplete. To ensure such opportunities aren't left unaddressed, banks need to connect the online experience with CRM to ensure follow-through.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.