The financial services industry (FSI) has seen a surge in online banking and digital payments over traditional brick-and-mortar banks ever since the COVID-19 pandemic. But this did not come as a surprise because in 2018, even before the pandemic, Gartner made a bold prediction that by 2030, 80 per cent of heritage financial services firms will go out of business. This will be due to a struggle for relevance as digital platforms, fintech companies and other non-traditional players gain greater market share by leveraging technology to revolutionize their business models.

In BDO’s 2021 Financial Services Digital Transformation Survey suggested that financial institutions understand the importance of executing their digital strategy swiftly and effectively amid the increasingly competitive industry landscape. However, with the prevalent use of technology comes a need for the players to strengthen their resilience against potential cyber risks, ensuring continued secure availability of their financial systems and most importantly, protection of data.

Zooming in on Malaysia, the Central Bank (Bank Negara Malaysia) in January 2020 published the Policy Document on Risk Management in Technology (RMiT), outlining requirements pertaining to the management of technology risks among financial institutions. For Microsoft, security and compliance are at the core of everything that we do. And as more organizations accelerate their transition to the cloud, we want to continue providing our customers with the technologies they can trust. That is why we are focused on helping our financial services customers deepen risk insights and facilitate compliance while protecting their organization and employees.

Testament to this, we recently announced the integration of Compliance-as-Code with Microsoft Azure, enhancing compliance offering and even extending this service not only to customers, but also their data center environments, which will now have similar visibility on risk and compliance.

Microsoft Azure’s Compliance-as-Code signifies a pledge from Microsoft Malaysia towards inclusive nation building, as part of our Bersama Malaysia to support our nation’s secure and inclusive digital economy. Essentially, this new integration minimizes cyber risks and costs for FSI players. With this, customers will also have access to a system that is modern, efficient, and compliant while increasing protection of their business and customers from cyber disruptions.

The integration reflects Microsoft’s mission to empower every organization to achieve more and is purposeful, enabling FSI players to meet the highest compliance, risk, and security standards that are aligned to Bank Negara Malaysia’s requirements, while providing continued support throughout their journey to the cloud.

For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, visit here.

This post was first published on LinkedIn by Ellian Teo, Enterprise Commercial Leader of Microsoft Malaysia