Microsoft solutions for Financial Services
Security and evidence that stand up to a regulator, without slowing the business down.
What this sector is dealing with
Banks, insurers, asset managers, and fintechs run some of the most scrutinised Microsoft estates there are. Every identity, every device, and every piece of client data sits inside a control framework that someone will audit. The pressure is not just to be secure, it is to prove it on demand.
We work across the Microsoft security and compliance stack to make that provable: identity as the control plane, data classified and protected where it lives, and detection wired into a SOC your team can actually run. The goal is controls that hold up under audit and still let people work.
The problems we get called in for
Audit evidence on demand
Regulators and internal audit want proof that controls exist and operate, not a slide deck describing intent.
Client data everywhere
Sensitive data spreads across Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, and endpoints faster than policy can follow it.
Privileged access risk
Standing admin rights across the tenant and Azure are the single largest blast radius in most estates.
Legacy alongside cloud
Core banking and on-premise systems have to coexist with Microsoft 365 without opening a path between them.
What Microsoft brings to financial services
The products that genuinely apply to this sector, and what each one is actually for here. Much of this sits inside licensing you may already hold.
Microsoft Entra ID
Identity becomes the control plane. Conditional Access enforces who can reach what, from which device, under what risk. Privileged Identity Management removes standing admin rights so elevation is time bound, approved, and logged, which is exactly the evidence auditors ask for.
Microsoft Purview
Client and market data gets classified and labelled at source, with data loss prevention stopping it leaving through email, Teams, or endpoints. Insider risk management and communication compliance cover the supervision obligations that come with regulated roles.
Microsoft Defender XDR
Correlated detection across identity, endpoint, email, and cloud apps. Defender for Office 365 handles the payment fraud and impersonation attempts that target finance teams directly.
Microsoft Sentinel
The audit trail and the detection layer in one place. Long retention for regulatory lookback, KQL analytics tuned to your fraud and access scenarios, and automated response for the alerts that repeat.
Microsoft Intune
Compliance policy decides whether a device is trusted before it reaches client data, with app protection covering the personal phones that inevitably touch Outlook and Teams.
Microsoft Azure
Landing zones with segmentation, Azure Policy guardrails, and Defender for Cloud so that new workloads inherit the control framework instead of bypassing it.
Typical engagements in this sector
The projects we are most often brought in to deliver for financial services, from full implementations to targeted uplifts.
Zero Trust and Conditional Access uplift
We tighten Conditional Access, remove standing privilege with PIM, and produce the control mapping that shows an auditor what changed and why.
Purview data protection rollout
Sensitivity labels, DLP, and insider risk deployed across Microsoft 365, so client information stays protected outside your tenant as well as inside it.
Sentinel SOC enablement
Detection design, tuned KQL analytics, and automated response workflows handed to your team with the runbooks to operate them.
Azure landing zone and cost optimisation
Segmented landing zones with policy guardrails, then right-sizing and reservations so cloud spend is a plan you can defend line by line.
Frameworks that shape the work
These are the frameworks and regulations we most often design against in financial services. We map Microsoft controls to the framework you are actually held to, and build the evidence trail as we go rather than reconstructing it the week before an audit.
ISO 27001
The information security management standard most enterprise buyers and auditors ask for by name. It wants a system, not a set of tools.
SOC 2
Trust criteria your customers test you against during due diligence. Controls have to operate over a period, not just exist on the day.
PCI DSS
Protection of cardholder data. Scope is everything here, and the cheapest control is a boundary that keeps systems out of scope.
GDPR and UK GDPR
Lawful handling of personal data, with real duties around retention, subject access, and breach notification timelines.
DORA
Operational resilience and ICT risk management for EU financial entities, including how you oversee your third parties.
FCA and PRA operational resilience
UK financial regulators expect you to identify important business services and prove you can keep them running through disruption.
NIST CSF
A framework for organising security around identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. Useful as the spine that other frameworks hang off.
Where to go next
The solutions we most often deliver for this sector.
Zero Trust
Verify explicitly, grant least privilege, and assume breach, applied to the estate you actually run.
Explore Zero TrustIdentity & Access
Entra ID as the control plane: Conditional Access, MFA, and privileged access under control.
Explore Identity & AccessMicrosoft Purview
Classify, label, and protect data where it lives, with DLP and insider risk behind it.
Explore Microsoft PurviewMicrosoft Sentinel
Cloud native SIEM with tuned analytics, automation, and a SOC your team can operate.
Explore Microsoft SentinelWe work across sectors
Working in financial services? Let us look at your estate.
Book a discovery call and we will walk through what you already own, what is switched on, and where the gaps are that matter in your sector.