Microsoft Copilot’s Most Impactful Use Cases – Part 1: Investment Banking

Our next few posts will highlight the advantages that AI-powered Copilot for Microsoft 365 brings to some of the most demanding use cases in the alternative investment space. Let’s start with a focus on investment banking and the many ways Copilot streamlines operations and ensures stronger collaboration, security and compliance for investment banking firms. 

Copilot Streamlines Investment Banking Operations

The world of investment banking is defined by strict regulation and a need for efficient and agile workflows to support in-depth financial analysis and various client services – from M&A advisory, to issue management, capital structure planning and more. All this plays out in an environment where qualified talent is scarce, and CIOs are looking for ways to streamline processes and enhance the productivity of their extremely limited workforce.

Copilot delivers on these requirements by automating workflows and arming employees with time-saving short-cuts. For instance, Copilot can automatically generate meeting notes, action items or flag where a particular person was mentioned. Copilot can also create Outlook reminders and suggestions for replies based on relevant e-mail and other M365 content. These and other features are welcome news in a field where investment banking staffing costs are considerable, even at the analyst level – meaning every hour saved magnifies the ROI compared to other industry sectors.

As a powerful and intuitive AI assistant, Copilot is facilitating more efficiency up and down the investment banking org chart. For instance, to better keep track of their teams and operations, managing directors and partners can leverage Copilot for content summaries from documents in M365 applications – distilling the essence of content and automatically vetting documents to flag changes or amendments from previous versions. But Copilot’s value is especially apparent at the analyst level, where it streamlines and simplifies dozens of crucial tasks necessary to support investment banking processes and workflows. 

Top Investment Banking Use Cases for Copilot

Investment banking relies on a series of complex operational processes that have traditionally required a lot of analyst time and effort to complete. That’s why Copilot is so transformative for investment banking. As just a few examples, consider the following use cases:

• Deal Management - Copilot can generate new deal folders and distribution lists and automatically create email notifications anytime these are updated. Copilot’s further ability to automatically retrieve data from third party sources, create expense codes and preload models based on deal type helps reduce setup time from days to minutes.

• CIM Generation - A Confidential Information Memorandum can run hundreds of pages. Copilot will generate the bulk of a CIM within minutes by automatically pulling in data from Excel, previous CIMs, PDFs and third-party sources like LinkedIn, FactSet, CapIQ and Pitchbook. 

• Deal Room Comparison and Tracking - Copilot can summarize what has changed in a deal room by looking at model changes and automatically generating a list of all changes. The AI assistant can also build agendas dynamically and track dependencies between data files.

• Competitor and Hypothetical Model Analysis - Copilot can pull in competitor data from across the internet or third-party sources. Furthermore, investment bankers can use Copilot to perform quick hypothetical analysis to examine likely outcomes from adjusting rates, curves, cash flows, debt structures and other parameters. 

• Legal Document Comparison or Analysis - Copilot will automatically compare NDAs, fund agreements and other commonly used documents to summarize key differences or deviations from standard templates being used. Copilot can also send automated alerts as documents are expiring or when revisions are needed to reflect regulatory changes.

All investment banking firm operations must happen in a secure and compliant manner. When properly configured by a qualified MSP partner like ECI, Copilot facilitates this through dynamic “just enough access” controls to ensure users only generate content relevant to them. Especially when it’s supported by MS Purview, Copilot can identify and classify sensitive information and prevent data loss through encryption and access controls – all while monitoring user activity to detect anomalies and defend against threats. 

Taken together, Copilot’s capabilities add up to tremendous value and efficiency for investment banking firms. And as a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner specializing in the alternative investment space, ECI is the ideal MSP to help investment banking firms get the most out of their Copilot investments. Learn more about how ECI can help!