UBS wants Microsoft to help it save money by storing its data. One of the decisive factors for the deal was the U.S. company’s presence in Switzerland.

UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, will start using the cloud solution of Microsoft in place of its own data storage centers. The bank hopes to cut costs through this deal, which is worth hundreds of millions of francs, according to a report by «Bloomberg».

Microsoft was awarded the lucrative deal partly because it operates its own data centers in Switzerland. This makes it possible for UBS to stick to the rules of Finma, the banking regulator, which stipulates that Swiss banks can only move their data abroad under very strict conditions.

Microsoft Plans Further Deals

The U.S. tech giant hopes the deal will help it win other major Swiss companies as clients and to beat the competition from Amazon, Google and others. Microsoft is targeting the banking, insurance and drug industries.

UBS hasn’t yet decided which of its applications it will outsource but no customer data has yet been moved.