Money20/20 USA took place in Las Vegas during October 2021, marking the 10th anniversary of the event. During the show, The Fintech Times caught up with several companies to discuss what the last 18 months looked like for them and what their key focus is moving forward.
In this video interview: Margaret Weichert, NA Payments Lead at Accenture; Michelle Baxter, Global Financial Services Executive at Avanade; and Marla Sofer, Industry Solutions CTO FS Cloud Lead at Microsoft come together to discuss the level of innovation needed now to prepare banks, payments platforms and other financial services institutions for the next generation of commerce.
Formed more than 20 years ago as a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, Avanade is Accenture’s engine for innovation and solutions with Microsoft. Our unique alliance brings the right industry perspective and the right tools, to lead our client’s digital transformation and journey to the cloud. Since that time, everything has changed – we have a mobile, always-on, constantly connected consumer base seeking instant access and immediate service. Simultaneously the financial services industry, which is often slow to enact change, has gone increasingly digital through the advent of Fintech.
“Over the years our focus has evolved to help our clients accelerate their journey to cloud,” explained Baxter. “We collaborate on features and various solutions that Microsoft is bringing to market so that we can help with product truth and help our clients in solving the most challenging problems.”
Weichert expanded on this, explaining how the teams work collaboratively. She said: “Even before the client decides what kind of cloud technology they want, they have a lot of questions about what’s most important, what use cases are they focussing on, etc. Accenture will work with them on those business problems, then we can bring the deep technical experts from Avanade to refine what we’re going to go after, then bring in our technology partners at Microsoft.”
Finally, Sofer concluded that: “Microsoft values the input from our partners around customer challenges and problems and where we also need to focus in order to pinpoint our solutions to address those problems.”
To learn more about the Accenture, Avanade, and Microsoft Alliance in Financial Services, watch the video in full now.
