Next in my current series I am talking about the various industry clouds that are readily available to deploy as part of the Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Microsoft 365 deployment. These industry clouds are a massive leap forward from the traditional "accelerators" that we may seen or deployed in the past. The historical accelerators came with a detailed common data model, but not much in the form of actual functionality.
The new industry cloud solutions, however, come with that same detailed common data model, but also now provide actual user functionality, integrations with Microsoft 365 and even Power Bi visualisations in some cases.
Overview
The industry clouds currently available for deployment are as follows,
Nonprofit - Provide nonprofit customers with a deeper understanding of their donors and supporters. Enhance their fundraising capabilities by aligning program needs with personalized supporter engagements.
Financial services - Manage loyalty and profitability for financial services organizations. Boost productivity through enhanced workflows and improved employee experiences and help clients combat financial crime with the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
Healthcare - Empower healthcare customers with enhanced patient engagement and personalized experiences at every point of care. Help organizations boost collaboration by connecting, engaging, and managing their teams with industry-leading solutions.
Manufacturing - Help manufacturing customers digitally empower their workforce by reskilling workers and enabling new digital experiences.
Retail - Help your retail customers get more value from their data by unifying data sources across the shopper journey.
In this article I am going to cover the deployment of and the functionality within the Microsoft Industry Cloud for Financial Services.
First step in the process is to access the deployment centre at, Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.
From here we access the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, where we will see the various components. I will provide an overview of these components later in the article.
At this, from a deployment perspective, we do need to take time to ensure we have the appropriate licenses in place. The Cloud for Financial Services requires the following for complete deployment
Dynamics 365 Sales license - Essential or Premium
Microsoft 365 License of any kind
Linked Sales Navigator License
Power Automate License
Power Bi Premium license
Additional license for Microsoft Dynamics Fraud Prevention and supporting applications may be required to use functionality deployed
There are a number of permissions, security roles and other pre-requisites, all of kind are contained within the following article, Deploy Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services - Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services | Microsoft Learn
Deploy
But let's assume we have all the necessary prerequisites in place and we are ready to deploy. The simplest way to do this is through the Solution Center linked above. We tick the boxes of the elements we need to deploy.
It is worth mentioning that elements can be deployed standalone, there is no requirement or dependencies on the various parts of the solution. For example, if you don't have Power Bi licenses you can still deploy the unified client profile app.
Once you have selected your modules, simply hit Deploy. The process will now go and deploy your solutions. This can takes upwards of an hour to complete.
Select the various solutions, and point to your environment,
Select the environment you want to use for your cloud solution
Once complete you will see a screen similar to the below,
Test our Solutions
Now our solutions are installed we can access our environment and test out the new functionality. The key functions we now have available to us are as follows,
Loan Onboarding Model Driven App
United Client Profile for wealth management Model Driven App
Unified Customer Profile for retail banking Model Driven App
All Apps supported by a Banking Data Model, Insurance Data Model
Intelligence Appointment scheduler, via Power Pages Portal
Loan Onboarding Model Driven App
The Loan Onboarding app has a fully end-to-end application process solution mapped out for us to use with some dummy data. In a real world scenario this could be paired with an external facing portal that would initiate the application process.
United Client Profile for Wealth Management Model Driven App
Both the Wealth Management and Retail Banking model-driven apps are an excellent tool for showing the "single view of the client". Again we are provided with a custom data model with loads of meaningful dummy data to bring these incredibly visual forms to life.
Unified Customer Profile for retail banking Model Driven App
Intelligence Appointment scheduler, via Power Pages Portal
The Power Pages Portal has an initial template for branding and includes company name and logo. This template portal is an excellent starting point for organisations who want to present an external facing tool for booking time with members of their financial teams.
The Book Now function takes you to a pre-configured multi-step form which allows us to book appointments with resources. The Everyday Banking section takes us to a sub-section of Savings & Credit Cards.
Of course the entire interface and terminology can be very easily customised to match the types of services an organisation provides.
The form then continues to allow users to select a meeting location, resources, time and date, before reviewing and submitting.
Overall this portal template provides a full end to end appointment booking solution, with real time data to ensure only available slots are presented to the users. There is an entire back end to the solutions which allows for admin, notifications and conflicts.
Hope you all enjoyed this post on the updated Industry Clouds for Microsoft. I will continue this series with some additional content specifically related to the other industry clouds for Retail. Take Care, Speak Soon!
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