From Post-It notes to Power BI: How Metro Bank is trying to cut IT costs with Microsoft cloud

Will digital cost-saving help Britain's first new bank in 100 years to climb back into the black?

UK challenger bank Metro Bank has just suffered a £10.7m loss in the third quarter of 2015, but has spent much of this money on working with Microsoft to build a future-proofed customer contact solution.

Metro Bank, which was only founded - fresh from the European financial crisis - in 2010, has declared plans for London Stock Exchange flotation in 2016, and attended Microsoft's Convergence 2015 conference in Barcelona this week to tell its ongoing technology story, which includes use of Microsoft solutions in collaboration, BI and general everyday administration.

Boasting the ability for a customer to "open an account in under 20 minutes", according to CCO Paul Riseborough, who spoke at yesterday's keynote, Metro Bank also offers a "24-hour call centre staffed by real people".

This is a bank that doesn't have customers - it has "fans". And it doesn't have branches, but "stores".

Priding itself on being the first new bank to open in the UK in more than 100 years, Metro Bank has taken £2.9bn ($4.4bn) in total deposits, split between a customer base of 45 per cent consumers and 55 per cent businesses. The company is growing rapidly, despite its losses, expanding by 87 per cent year on year.

The bank likes to present itself as entrenched in digital, saving "one million pieces of paper a month", according to Riseborough, by emailing Ts&Cs to new customers instead of mailing, with e-signatures on tablets signing off on new accounts instead of in-branch paperwork.

Bruce Rioch is director of Microsoft technologies and business information at Metro Bank - a job title that shows how seriously the company is taking its status as a Microsoft shop.

In today's customer presentation session, he explained how the company has been using Office 365 since the start:

"We know everyone wants Word, Excel and PowerPoint on their desktops, but we also decided to leverage the cloud," he said.

"We take notes on OneNote, and Skype for Business is critical to us."

Rioch also described Yammer as "the heartbeat of the organisation", with "thousands of messages shared a day, sharing stories and recognising people."

Dynamics Social Listening and Dynamics Marketing are also used to keep tabs of what customers are saying, and generating "rich communication" to those customers, respectively.

Parature, the customer service software product Microsoft acquired in 2014, has also been of great use to Metro Bank in terms of building a knowledgebase and search function for policies and procedures.

The company is also employing Power BI in an effort to tie together everything it learns about its customers.

"Power BI has been a huge, huge success for us," said Rioch, adding that it puts BI "at the fingertips of all colleagues".

"Forty-two dashboards show us how many logins we have [on the bank website, and its accompanying mobile app], who's making payments, see what customers are doing and what functionality they're using - like temporarily blocking [account] cards, for example," offered Rioch.

But as mentioned earlier - and perhaps as a reflection of the bank's struggles in its ongoing startup period - streamlining has been a particularly important part of its life with Microsoft.

"It was important we streamlined our business processes," said Rioch.

"Three years ago we managed business processes through SharePoint check boxes and even Post-It notes," admitted Rioch.

"So part of the process here was to hoover up business processes that were loose. In our first go-live [with Dynamics] we added around 10 critical banking processes.

"We wanted to make sure every task was documented in the CRM, so we could manage our business processes end to end, from department to department - if you see a mortgage adviser, it still has to be passed to an underwriting team, they organise valuations, get those valuations back, then there's other legal stuff, offer letters - it's important to keep a grip of what's happening."

Whatever the future holds for Metro Bank and its stock market flotation, it creates an undeniably slick picture of a wholesale Microsoft adoption, and is undoubtedly learning to save money with all its new toys.