Introduction
At Scottish Summit 2024, I had the pleasure of presenting a deep dive into Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services (C4FSI). This is a topic that I am very passionate about, since I’ve been focusing on FSI customers for many years now. Even though it was the last session of the last day, some interested participants showed up and it led to some interesting discussions.
Ever since the session, I’ve been thinking about turning it into a blog post to be able to reach a wider audience. Now that my blog is finally live, I thought this would make a great first post.
The message conveyed in my session
Back in October 2024, the message was already clear; Microsoft was phasing out Cloud for FSI
It was no longer sold as an individual product, but some of the components were still quite useful. And the good news was that these components were now open-sourced and available on GitHub.
I spent the better part of my session going through the available components and how to utilize them:
- Industry specific data models for retail banking, wealth management and insurance
- A customizable customer profile with all the most important data about a banking customer
- Sample onboarding applications: Model-driven apps for customer and loan onboarding, complete with task management and document intelligence.
- Compliance program & Fraud protection
Brushing up before writing this post
When revisiting my slides and notes before writing this post, I quickly realized that things had changed. Almost all of the components I went through in the session are no longer publicly available – in fact, even the GitHub repository seems to have disappeared, even though it was open sourced.
My initial thought with this post was to convey the same message as in the session: The offering has been deprecated, but you can still utilize the components.
That simply isn’t true any longer. The only thing left on the official MS Learn pages is some generic information about Microsoft products and a set of Azure landing zones for FSI (What is Microsoft for Financial Services?)
But I don’t really understand why they had to remove all of the old components. Microsoft had already made it clear that the components wouldn’t be maintained anymore and that they were provided “as is”, without any kind of support.
Ideas worth discussing
Looking through my slides still sparks a lot of ideas. Even though AI is front and center in everything we do today, I believe many of the old ideas are still relevant. Take, for example, a streamlined customer profile with visual components that display the most important KPIs on a single page. This kind of view gives users an instant overview of their customer, which is always important. Then they can leverage AI to drill into details or suggest the next best action — just to give a few examples.
Not to mention the industry specific data model! If all FSI-customers utilize the same (or very similar) data models in Dataverse, it will be a lot easier to train and use AI-models.
The technical solutions change over time, but many of the business needs remain the same. Or what do you think?
Will AI transform our industry to the point where a consolidated customer profile is no longer relevant?
Even though Microsoft has removed the official repository, I still have a local clone along with quite a bit of related material I’ve collected over time. Having that archive allows me to revisit the components, analyse Microsoft’s original approach, and reflect on what still holds value today — which brings me to my final point:
An open invitation
The message from Microsoft is clear: they are not planning to build and maintain any industry-specific offering for FSI. And even though Microsoft has always hoped that partners would step in, I think we have to be realistic and admit that this is not going to happen.
That leaves it up to us as a community… If we want to keep the idea of an industry best practice alive, we have to do it together. I will continue to explore this area with my clients, and I will keep sharing my ideas here and on LinkedIn.
But I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t want this to be a one-way story. If you work in Financial Services with Dynamics 365 and/or Power Platform, I’d love to hear your perspective.
Let’s share experiences, compare lessons learned, and explore what might come next – together!