With turmoil continuing in financial markets, innovative development perhaps takes on new significance with its promise of differentiation and indeed cost savings.

Banks, brokerage firms, and insurers understand that the only way forward is figuring out, before their competitors do, how to achieve a clear, real-time view of their relationship with their customers across multiple products and channels. The institutions able to keep the attention of investment and Web-savvy millennial customers are those that offer personalized, high-quality service including on their Web site.

Microsoft is tightening its relationship with key players in financial services hoping to help companies realize these objectives. For one, Microsoft believes it has found the strategy to make BI ubiquitous in the enterprise, providing all relevant employees with the necessary insight they need to drive their companies to better performance.

In addition, as Microsoft’s Colin Cole points out in an interview this issue, Microsoft Silverlight enables the type of interactive Web presence that companies and their customers are looking for.

Some financial services firms meanwhile are enhancing the newest technologies. The Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards recognizes five IT projects that stand out as using advanced Microsoft technologies creatively to improve enterprise performance. On our cover is MAAKL MUTUAL Berhad, part of Malaysia’s largest insurance group. Its Home Office Application has been spearheaded by CEO Boon Choy Wong who sees the comprehensive suite of business intelligence tools as a key element of his company’s advisor-centric business model that the chief executive has used to propel the company’s dramatic growth.

Among the components that its investment professionals use is MAAKL Planners, which enables advisors to manage and track their clients’ investments anytime, anywhere. The application also offers What-If Analysis, a fund price/index history charting tool, and fund/index comparisons so investment professionals can track the performance of target funds or indices against various benchmarks. In addition, its newest version includes a time-weighted rate of return capability, which measures the compound growth rate of a portfolio by eliminating distortions resulting from the inflows of new money. As a result, it provides a clearer comparison point for the actual returns a particular fund is achieving over time.

Four other projects join MAAKL’s Home Office Application as recipients of the WFS Developer Awards: Bank of America’s Global Underwriting Solution; Merrill Lynch’s ALM Framework; Piraeus Bank’s International eBanking Platform; and Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Auditing and Compliance Solution.

The awards were presented at Microsoft’s Sixth Annual Financial Services Developer Conference in New York on March 13.