What Microsoft’s new cloud platform means for mortgage

HW-Bill-Borden — Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft

Tech giant Microsoft plans to launch a new cloud-computing offering targeting the financial-services market on Nov. 1 as part of an effort to further bolster its fast-expanding cloud business. The secondary market may want to take note.

The Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services has been operating in a preview mode since March, with lenders like Navy Federal Credit Union and Virgin Money UK among the first financial institutions to take it for a test drive, according to a company blog. But Microsoft already has an impressive array of financial services companies as clients in the cloud-computing space, including Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered Bank, BNY Mellon, Franklin Templeton and Fannie Mae.

“Microsoft’s Azure [cloud-computing product] has been steadily gaining market traction for quite some time now, but Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, leads the cloud-computing space, which is a major headwind,” states a recent research report by Zacks Investment Research. “… [Microsoft’s] Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes server, and enterprise products and services, contributed 37.6% to total revenues. The segment reported revenues of $17.375 billion, up 30% year over year [for the company’s fourth quarter ended June 30].”

Amazon, too, has a cloud segment dedicated to the financial services industry. Still, Microsoft’s pending entry into that market with industry-dedicated cloud offerings promises to ratchet up the competition for clients who are seeking out digital and automation services in a fast-evolving market.

Microsoft also has lined up a host of partners that will be offering services and products through the financial-services cloud platform. Among them are accounting and consulting giants KPMG, EY and PwC as well as a host of independent software service and product providers — such as digital-lending platform Mortgage365, financial-software solutions platform Finastra and the financial-data solutions fintech BaseCap Analystics.