As part of its digital transformation, Bank of America is turning to the Microsoft Cloud to help deliver new business efficiencies, support digital culture change and better meet customer needs.
“Technology is increasingly providing a competitive advantage to financial services firms looking to thrive in the digital economy,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft Corp. “Bank of America is taking a very strategic approach to cloud, looking at technology as a means to drive change and open up new business opportunities. With Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, the firm will have access to the breadth and depth of our cloud capabilities, underscored by Microsoft’s investments in security, transparency and regulatory compliance.”
Bank of America will take advantage of the combined power of the Microsoft Cloud for business transformation. Microsoft Office 365 will provide modern, cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools to some of the bank’s 200,000 employees. The firm will also utilize Microsoft Azure, capitalizing on the scale, economics and intelligent capabilities of the platform and services.
“We are aggressively modernizing our technology infrastructure to enable current and future growth across all our lines of business,” said Howard Boville, chief technology officer at Bank of America. “Our agreement with Microsoft aligns to our target of delivering 80 percent of our technology workloads on virtual platforms within the next several years, further establishing Bank of America as a digital leader in financial services.”
Microsoft’s Financial Services Compliance program — a unique program that allows firms and regulators to deeply examine Microsoft cloud systems, services and processes — provides transparency into Microsoft cloud operations. This helps ensure Microsoft has taken the proper steps to secure data and mitigate risk. In addition, Microsoft’s industry-leading compliance portfolio assists financial institutions move to the cloud while meeting current compliance requirements, as well as plan for future regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation.
Microsoft continues to see strong cloud adoption from the financial services industry, with more than 80 percent of the world’s largest banks and more than 75 percent of the global systemically important financial institutions using Azure. This represents the highest bar for legal, compliance, security and acquisitions teams.