Microsoft Customers and Partners Say They Are People-Ready at Asian Banker Summit 2006

Microsoft Customers and Partners Say They Are People-Ready at Asian Banker Summit 2006

March 17, 2006

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Getronics and NetEconomy Support Microsoft at Leading APAC Retail Banking Event

    BANGKOK, Thailand, March 17 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ --
Today at the Asian Banker Summit 2006 in Bangkok, Microsoft
Corp (Nasdaq: MSFT) representatives were joined on stage by
John Beggs, executive general manager, Commonwealth Bank of
Australia.  At a session entitled "the branch and
multi-channel distribution strategies", Beggs echoed
much of the People-Ready speech given by Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer yesterday, as Beggs highlighted the major
improvement in sales and service capabilities that has been
achieved at the bank by empowering employees through the
implementation of the bank's innovative and highly
successful branch and call centre solution based on
Microsoft(R) .NET and centred on customer relationship
management. 

    (Logo: 
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO )

    David Vander, worldwide managing director of banking
for Microsoft's Financial Services Group, introduced Beggs'
session with a short presentation on Microsoft's strategic
view for the financial services marketplace.  During his
speech, Vander discussed Microsoft's mission to help
banking customers use technology to amplify the impact
their employees can deliver to drive business success.

    At its exhibition booth, shared with global partner,
Getronics, Microsoft demonstrated solutions for the
financial services marketplace including the Microsoft
Customer Care Framework (CCF).  CCF automates the delivery
of customer information across multi-channel environments.
Using CCF, banks are able to manage both their customer's
behaviour and their overall experience more effectively. 
In addition, CCF can help to reduce a bank's operational
costs across all customer touch points, including branches
and call centres. 

    The interest in anti-money laundering initiatives in
the APAC region was highlighted by the significant footfall
to NetEconomy's booth.  The real-time enterprise risk
monitoring solutions firm and Microsoft partner,
demonstrated its anti-money-laundering and fraud-detection
solutions, designed to help bank staff tackle fraudulent
financial transactions in the APAC region.

    "Our ERASE Financial Crime Suite solution,
demonstrated today at the Asian Banker Summit, increases
the business value of financial crime fighting initiatives
for our customers, making it faster and easier to prevent,
detect and manage financial crime," said Sebastian
Kuntz, CEO, NetEconomy.  "Customers benefit further
from less expensive technology platform costs, as well as
reduced personnel overheads for installing and operating
back-office environments by leveraging the Microsoft
platform -- driving down total cost of ownership costs from
small, to large-scale implementations."

    Commenting on the event, Wolfgang Boehm, Microsoft
managing director of financial services -- Asia-Pacific,
said, "We have found that bankers in Thailand and the
rest of Asia-Pacific region are experiencing many of the
same issues as financial institutions in other parts of the
world -- how to improve customer service, how to increase
operational efficiency and reduce costs, and how to better
manage risk and meet the demands of regulators.  At this
event Microsoft has demonstrated that by providing
employees with familiar and easy to use desktop tools that
work seamlessly with collaboration tools and back-end
systems, banks can meet these challenges head on, while
also gaining significant competitive advantage."

    About Microsoft in Financial Services

    Microsoft is a leading provider of software products
and technology to the financial services industry.  Its
customers operate in every area of retail banking,
insurance and pensions, and the financial markets. 
Microsoft focuses on providing enhanced security,
scalability and increased reliability, all of which the
financial enterprise requires.  Through Microsoft .NET and
its support of XML Web services, Microsoft helps customers
act on information virtually any time, any place and from
any smart device.  Working with leading software vendors
and systems integrators, Microsoft supports financial
institutions in re-engineering core business operations,
achieving straight-through processing (STP), better
managing all aspects of risk and capital adequacy,
increasing efficiency in branch banking operations,
establishing a new generation of telephone and
internet-based financial services channels, and leveraging
technology to amplify the impact their people can deliver
to drive business success. 

    About Microsoft

    Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and
businesses realise their full potential.

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