BANGKOK--20 Mar--PRNewswire-AsiaNet/InfoQuest Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Getronics and NetEconomy Support Microsoft at Leading APAC Retail Banking Event Today at the Asian Banker Summit 2006 in Bangkok, Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq: BSFT) 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 businesssuccess. 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 moreeffectively. 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 leveragingtechnology 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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