Conversation and Collaboration

Microsoft’s Susan Hauser envisions more partnership emerging in the financial industry

By Renee Wijnen Caruthers

Early in her career, Microsoft’s vice president of worldwide financial services, Susan Hauser, started a conversation with customers. That dialog, which began with a council of CIOs – 12 at the time – was a frank discussion about what Microsoft was doing right, but also what it needed to do to become a significant partner to the financial industry. It became a blueprint, not only for other councils in other markets, but also for a strategy of engaging the customer in helping to determine where investments should be made.

It was also representative of the part of technology Hauser most enjoys – the applied side of IT, in which technology is viewed in terms of how it can address critical business needs. “My passion and love is leveraging technology to solve a particular business challenge,” Hauser says. “My whole background has been about how we drive solutions; how we take a product and make it applicable.”

Flash forward to the present, and Hauser sees a change in the conversations taking place in the industry. The recent economic shake-up has pushed the industry to think less about maintaining the status quo, and more about building new models and exploring new possibilities, she says.

“The conversations we are having with customers now are so different from the ones we were having two years ago. There’s more out-of-the-box thinking,” she says. “There’s more talk about partnerships on a technical level, and also more thought about how do we reach out and provide more methodology for the customers about how they make decisions. There is a wealth of discussion beyond pure technology and there are some very exciting ideas. The economic pressures pressed a reset that is changing the view of what things will look like.”

One early result of that reset has been new collaborations between companies that were once separated by competitive rivalries. Microsoft has partnered in recent months with firms that are its head-to-head competitors in some areas.

Financial institutions are demanding their IT organizations deliver more value through better utilization of existing infrastructure in order to drive ROI up. By improving the ability companies have to access and utilize off-premise services and information, cloud computing can help firms grow the services they offer to their customers exponentially. Firms adopting the cloud computing economic resource sharing model will be better positioned to further expand their business processes and services dynamically and drive efficiency without the traditional expenses associated with expanding and maintaining internal infrastructures.

Hauser would also like to see Microsoft continue helping financial services customers establish strong return on investment (ROI) metrics in part by helping clients prioritize projects and build that prioritization into its processes.

“It’s a type of priority engineering. If we are working with companies on a worldwide enterprise basis, we may have ten projects we are working on for a client,” says Hauser. “I would like to see more collaboration in assessing the organization’s framework – sitting down at a table together and deciding what should go first, and how to be accountable in showing and measuring results.”

In the next 12 to 24 months, Hauser envisions the financial services group helping to bring evidence to markets of these early leaders who are experimenting in areas like cloud computing, software-plus-services, CRM and stronger management.

“We are working closely with customers and partners and in the next 12 to 24 months we expect to see strong business propositions, new trends and some software-plus-services partnerships that you might not have thought of in the past,” she says. “There was a time when people were a bit paralyzed trying to keep things afloat. Conversations are flowing now and there’s a lot of creativity. The next steps and the investments made over the next year will reshape the industry and how it connects with the customer.”