Microsoft exec outlines ambitious capital markets strategy

The term “smartphone” often conjures the image of an Apple iPhone, even though it’s but one of many options on the market. The same can be said for Microsoft’s place in the corporate world, as the word “inbox” equates to Outlook, “spreadsheets” means Excel, and “networking” evokes LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for more than $26 billion. That’s ubiquity.

But as Big Tech companies make further inroads into the capital markets—primarily through their cloud services: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—these already-omnipresent companies believe their utility has a long way to go until it hits a ceiling, if one exists. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its intention to introduce generative AI-powered “copilots” into its commonly used enterprise products, including Microsoft 365, the Dynamics 365 suite of business applications, and GitHub, the open-source code repository and development platform it acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018. Developed in conjunction with OpenAI—the owner of ChatGPT and the startup in which Microsoft invested billions—these copilots combine large language models (LLMs) and users’ own data to augment their workflows. 

Financial services is about managing risk. If you’re going to manage risk, you’ll be slow by nature. But that’s a concern because people are like, ‘Are we going to miss the boat?’

Bill Borden, Microsoft

Microsoft launched the first of these assistive copilots in GitHub, which allows users to tell the tool what kind of code they want to develop in any preferred coding language, and in return, the copilot will write and give back structured code. 

“We just saw tremendous productivity gains—50 to 55-plus percent productivity gains around the coding environment to actually get coders started,” says Bill Borden, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of worldwide financial services. 

Borden tells WatersTechnology that stringing pieces of code together this way allows developers to go through their testing and de-bugging phases faster—early phases in the development lifecycle where users saw the most productivity gains—leading to a faster time to production.

The Microsoft 365 copilot, which became generally available at the start of November, can scan a user’s email inbox for outstanding action items, or remind them they had said they’d follow up on a certain item. When recording a conversation through Teams, the Teams copilot will generate a summary of what was said on a call and who agreed to take what actions, and the output is ready by the last tenth minute of the scheduled time slot, so users can review it before they hang up.

“Because we built a technology stack to build these copilots—we did that internally first—we’re now making that developer stack available to anybody who wants to build their own copilot,” Borden says. “So now we have customers and independent software vendor partners that are building their own copilots.”

In one example, Moody’s, which signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft in June, launched Moody’s Research Assistant, which generates custom analyses of a company or sector by combining data from across multiple dimensions—such as firmographic data, credit indicators, economic forecasts, and risk and reputational profiles—to provide fast and contextualized answers based on the integration of expansive LLMs and Moody’s data, analytics, and research.

The pairing of Moody’s and Microsoft is only a small piece of the many cloud provider-exchange-institution deals inked in the last year. In addition to the CME and Google, Nasdaq and AWS, and Deutsche Borse and Google, Microsoft also made headlines when it signed a 10-year deal with the London Stock Exchange.

In addition to LSEG’s intention to use its partnership with Microsoft to create a directory of financial markets participants, the pair is jointly working on a new product called Fabric, which will be an end-to-end data and analytics solution for enterprises that will see LSEG become “customer zero” before being made broadly available. 

“The construct of that deal with the London Stock Exchange, as we were talking as an institution, was, ‘Wow, we can have a lot of impact on the ecosystem,’ given the power of the two companies,” Borden says. 

The problem that LSEG sought to solve was data discovery and how to make the process of communication and information-sharing in capital markets easier and faster. To start, LSEG moved all of its on-premises Refinitiv data (and data based in other clouds) to Azure. But LSEG, realizing that a lot of parties in its ecosystem utilize Teams, began asking about ways that Refinitiv data could be highlighted in Teams.

“And we said, wouldn’t it be really interesting if Refinitiv data could show up on the desktop and Excel? Or [what if it could] interact with Microsoft products that already exist on the desktop?” Borden says.

And that’s a starting point, Borden adds. The Fabric use-case, so far, doesn’t touch generative AI or LLMs—but there’s a lot of room to think about how they, and copilots, fit in down the line, as banks are currently being cautious around genAI use cases.

First inning

Borden says the partnership between LSEG and Microsoft is unique compared to other exchanges that have partnered with major cloud providers in that it isn’t really about the cloud at all; it is about creating new products and technologies meant to be leveraged by more than just the deal’s parties. 

In other words, how can Microsoft become even more ubiquitous than it already is in the business world—and by how much? The company intends to find out. But for Borden, it’s not just about productivity gains. The most interesting thing he’s found, in talking to other companies throughout the genAI boom, is there seem to be two schools of thought. On one hand, all the focus is on productivity alone. On the other, there’s concern that the focus on productivity is undermining the real potential that genAI can bring. 

“Are we just being incremental?” Borden asks. “Financial services is about managing risk. If you’re going to manage risk, you’ll be slow by nature. But that’s a concern because people are like, ‘Are we going to miss the boat?’ and not really think about the disruptive capabilities around how we re-think processes and how we deliver products, services, and experiences with this capability.”

Though Microsoft has its roadmap, Borden says this is only the first inning. “We don’t know what things are going to be created.”