Noor Bank, a leading Shari’a-compliant bank in the UAE, today announced a significant partnership with Microsoft that will drive digital transformation within the bank’s operations to engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and transform products and services.

Within its decade-long presence, Noor Bank has grown at a substantial pace, and today provides a broad range of products and services in the personal and corporate banking spaces, in addition to offering wealth-management, insurance, treasury and trading services. Each of Noor’s offerings is known for its ability to meet the nuanced needs of individual customers. The bank has built a trusted identity with its suite of innovative products and technological upgrade, thus reinforcing its commitment to providing outstanding customer experience to its clients as well as assuring them of high quality, convenience and best-in-class security at all touch-points.

In response to an increasing demand from millennial consumers for personalised service coupled with the flexibility of omni-channel digital experiences, Noor shaped its IT strategy to implement an enterprise-wide CRM system that would transform customer engagement. The bank’s leadership team focused on rolling out sales, marketing and services CRM modules across its centres of operations. The solution was to deliver a single 360-degree point of information on customers, including prospects across corporate, retail, wealth and investments. It was also envisaged to be the core front-end enterprise application for the management of the customer lifecycle – from on-boarding to servicing, sales, marketing and off-boarding.

Noor Bank chose the Microsoft Dynamics 365’s CRM platform for its ability to deliver 360-degree views of customers, through its Common Data Model. Views will cover portfolios, interactions, experiences and automated services. Microsoft will work with Noor’s IT and line-of-business executives to ensure the platform will support the bank’s digital agenda and operational requirements for years to come.

During the selection process, the bank’s decision-makers also took note of Dynamics 365’s capacity for operational optimisation, especially the Social Selling dashboard, which collates open leads, top prospects and task schedules in a single, visual interface.

Another reason Noor Bank was attracted to Dynamics 365’s customer-engagement suite was LinkedIn Sales Navigator, an advanced tool that allows sales teams to manage the entire pipeline through the popular professional-networking platform. LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps sales teams leverage LinkedIn’s rich network to source new customers, nurture and grow existing relationships and maximize sales productivity and results, all through one platform.

John Iossifidis, Chief Executive Officer of Noor Bank, said: “Noor Bank is committed to being at the forefront of innovation by creating safe and seamless experiences for employees and customers. With Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 platform, we aim to empower our people to collaborate and deliver a differentiated level of service. The real time data and analytics gathered through this tool will allow us to stay ahead of the curve and deliver outstanding customer experiences.”

“Digital transformation yields boons that bridge business functions,” said Sayed Hashish, Regional, General Manager, Microsoft Gulf. “The ability to engage, empower, optimise, and transform – is the promise that platforms like Dynamics 365 deliver. It merges ERP and CRM, offers flexibility, cost benefits with a rich menu of AI-based business intelligence, and is built around a warehousing architecture called the Common Data Model, so it can pull together and standardize data to deliver rich, actionable value. This is why Noor has joined many other customers worldwide that rely on the Dynamics suite to deliver best-in-class service to its customers. We look forward to supporting their journey as they continue to explore new ways to achieve more.”

Following a significant surge in the demand for its cloud services in the region, Microsoft earlier this year announced it will make available its secure, flexible and intelligent cloud to regional customers through two dedicated cloud data centres, one in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi. These facilities will cater specifically to enterprises in the Middle East. Organisations in the region’s financial services sector can make the most out of the Microsoft Cloud by availing themselves of enterprise-grade reliability and performance, combined with data residency and the broadest compliance.