Barclays strikes deal with Microsoft to migrate staff to Teams

Barclays and Microsoft have announced a multi-year agreement that sees the Redmond giant’s Teams platform become the bank’s collaboration tool of choice.

Microsoft Teams will power collaboration between the firm’s 120k staff and service partners, making it one of the largest deployments of the platform in the financial services industry.

The move will streamline Barclay’s existing communications and collaboration solutions, with Teams replacing several point solutions previously in place across the business.

The bank has worked closely with Microsoft to develop a deployment plan across the company, which includes enhancing the data retention, search and retrieval capabilities available with Microsoft Purview, Microsoft’s unified data governance solution for managing software-as-a-service (SaaS) data.

“Modern technology is essential to enabling our employees to deliver the highest level of service to our customers in a way that is resilient and sustainable,” commented Craig Bright, global chief information officer, Barclays.

“Microsoft Teams gives us an end-to-end collaboration platform that helps us connect our colleagues and enhance our business capabilities.”

Microsoft has been beefing up its Teams platform in recent months, introducing several enhancements that include call quality improvements such as echo cancellation and audio adjusting for poor acoustic environments.

The Redmond firm has also tweaked the platform so that it uses 50% less power than when it first launched, meaning video calls and meetings are now considerably more cost effective for businesses.

In its latest announcement, Microsoft revealed that Barclays was able to deploy Teams globally “within months”, with the impact immediately enabling greater collaboration and communication within teams, with the bonus of reduced email traffic.

“Over the past two years, digital collaboration has become central to how work gets done,” said Rajesh Jha, executive vice president, Experiences & Devices, Microsoft.

“Barclays is leading the way for the financial services industry globally, by giving its employees modern communication and collaboration tools that enable them to connect without friction.”