Welcome back to Azure Every Day! We took a break in January to regroup, refresh and get some new writers involved in our Azure Every Day series. We're back with more great content every weekday all about Azure, with tips, up to date info, use cases and more.
This first post is about retirement planning – an interesting topic these days. At this point, the state of financial planning is a potential major crisis with current and future generations coming upon retirement age with little or no savings to account for.
As we’ve moved away from pensions of the old, the responsibility held previously by the companies, has now shifted to individuals having to invest and save on their own to ensure they’re set up after they retire.
I wanted to share a recent press release from Microsoft who announced that they created a partnership with BlackRock to help reimagine the way people manage their retirement planning. BlackRock is a world leader in wealth management, including providing solutions to consumers and currently manages approximately 6.5 trillion in assets for investors worldwide.
The goal of this alliance is to find ways for people to interact with their retirement assets more, so they know what kind of contributions they’re making. BlackRock will design and manage a suite of next generation investment tools that aim to provide a ‘lifetime’ of income in retirement. This would be made available to US workers through their employer’s workplace savings plan.
The press release did not share much detail about what exactly the two firms will partner on, but the following is a quote from Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella: “Together with BlackRock, we will apply the power of the cloud and AI to introduce new solutions that address this important challenge and reimagine retirement planning.”
As we know, AI, deep learning and machine learning and all their related technologies, can have a profound impact on information gathering, processing and the intelligence we can extract from it. This helps us make better decisions.
The idea here is to offer technology options to businesses for their employees to consume and promote fiduciary responsibility. There will be more complex options that have been shunned previously by employers because of their complexity and costliness.
BlackRock has shown that they want to move their technology footprint forward with acquisitions and investments in firms in recent years. In 2015, they acquired a robo advisor company, as well as invested in Acorns, a company which helps millennials save their spare change to put it into a savings account.
Last year, BlackRock acquired Investment, a company that gives them more sophisticated online investment tooling. It is also believed that additional partnerships will come along to help support any of these new investment options, the plans and the employees.
When it comes to how the world is changing, AI is thought to be one of the biggest conversations occurring in 2019. At the heart of AI is data—data quality and consistency. These important factors are something we focus on at Pragmatic Works, as well as knowing that this is what our clients need to rely on.
This press release shows where we’re going with some of the AI technology that’s a huge topic of conversations in organizations today. If you have questions around AI, the data landscape or Microsoft Azure, Pragmatic Works has the expertise to help. Click the link below or contact us to get a conversation started today, no matter where you are on your cloud journey.
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