Australia’s sixth largest bank, Bank of Queensland Group (BOQ) and Microsoft have today announced a five-year strategic partnership to accelerate the company’s cloud-first digital transformation.
The partnership will help the bank to simplify its digital landscape, provide more modern and personalised banking services for customers, and fuel further innovation.
As part of the agreement Microsoft will become BOQ Group’s preferred cloud provider with the bank progressively transitioning its technology infrastructure and applications to Microsoft Azure by 2025. For BOQ, the move to a single cloud environment will help to drive efficiencies and enable greater use of automation and other cloud-native capabilities to improve customer experience and expediate time to market for the development of new features.
In addition, BOQ will become the first Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services customer in Australia and New Zealand and the two companies will test and co-design speciality products for the Australian and New Zealand market.
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services will be a key component for realising BOQ’s goal of delivering more personalised and intuitive data-driven experiences for its customers across its channels.
While the financial institution is currently a leading user of Microsoft Azure, Azure data and AI, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365 in Australia, this partnership will broaden that relationship to accelerate delivery of outcomes providing customer, and employee value.
The strategic partnership is built on three strategic drivers: establishing foundational capabilities and efficiencies through Azure Cloud, delivering intuitive banking services using Financial Services Cloud, and driving a culture of innovation.
A team of Microsoft global and regional executives, supported by US and locally based engineering teams will partner with BOQ throughout its digital transformation.
The two companies have been working together since 2019, when BOQ deployed Dynamics 365 to optimise its customer experience. Microsoft also helped strengthen the banking group’s technology capability within its branches and across the broader workforce in 2020 through BOQ’s internal Banker X program.
As part of Banker X, BOQ commenced transitioning its employees to the Microsoft Office 365 suite, migrating to a modern, managed working operating system, and introduced new Microsoft Surface and other personal computing devices across its workforce, supporting the latest capabilities in hybrid working.
Leadership comments
BOQ Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer George Frazis joined Microsoft Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff in Sydney recently.
“Our purpose is to build social capital with our customers and the community, and partnerships are critical to achieving this. We are excited to have such a strong partner in Microsoft to support us in building the digital bank of the future,” Frazis said.
