Two new partnerships focus Microsoft Azure team on data security in finance

Microsoft announced two new cloud partnerships this week focused on secure financial management.

The company announced a proof of concept cloud partnership with global financial messaging services provider SWIFT, to host its infrastructure and native payments on Microsoft Azure. The arrangement will lead to the future deployment of SWIFT messaging solutions in the cloud. Today, enterprises and banks send messages over the SWIFT network, using on-premises SWIFT technology.

Microsoft's own treasury department, which manages over $150 billion in assets and supports $400 billion per year in SWIFT based payments, is serving as the initial user for the proof of concept.

The process works as follows for Microsoft:

Microsoft Treasury sends a wire instruction through SAP on Azure which gets validated using machine learning algorithms. Once validated for authenticity, these wires are then sent to SWIFT via Microsoft's SWIFT installation on the cloud. SWIFT validates the wire instructions and sends it off to the appropriate bank. Once the bank completes the wire instruction it sends confirmation over to Microsoft.

"Cloud adoption continues to increase within the financial services industry, and we are thrilled to partner with Microsoft to bring the benefits of the cloud to SWIFT customers and ecosystem partners via Microsoft Azure," said Arnaud Boulnois, head of customer platforms at SWIFT.

Beyond the initial plans, the two teams intend to look for opportunities to "add additional business logic, advanced analytics, and AI capabilities to further improve how banks and corporates conduct transfers and identify trends and insights."

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