Exciting time for financial institutions to accelerate digital progress: Microsoft official

New Delhi: Financial institutions should focus on further accelerating digital progress, take bold bets and harness the power of technology to support value creation, a senior Microsoft official said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the 'Future Ready Industry week - BFSI edition', Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Financial Services, Microsoft, said financial services players need to think about the bold impact that technology and digital transformation can have on products and services, in expanding reach, and driving innovation and transparency.

"It is an exciting time to continue to think about acceleration and... bold bets that you can make, the bold impact that you can have on products and services and being able to broaden the market and access to financial services, to drive transparency in terms of the products and services, to reach more people... to reach more institutions, to give organisations the ability to create economic value in the communities and environments that they do business in, and to think what more can we provide...," Borden said.

He urged players to think about the power of technology to support such outcomes.

"Whether it is moving to the cloud to drive scale around computing, networking and data driven capabilities, the use of artificial intelligence across your data and infrastructure, you've got to be able to bring your data together in a manner that you can reason across it, so that you can create value on that," Borden said during a chat with Microsoft India Managing Director Sashikumar Sreedharan at the virtual event.

Microsoft's Future Ready Industry week witnessed a confluence of perspectives as industry leaders from leading financial institutions shared how digital transformation provides new opportunities to create value and rethink the way they operate with customers.