Contoso Financial Group
What follows is fiction with working parts. The firm, the people, and the numbers are invented; the tools, file formats, and product facts are real and cited, as of July 2026.
The firm
Contoso Financial Group is a global asset & wealth manager with a capital-markets services arm — Fortune-50 scale: $2.4T AUM, 41,000 employees, 28 countries. Headquartered in New York, with hubs in London, Singapore, Sydney. Three divisions: Institutional Asset Management (the engagement focus); Wealth; Capital Markets Services (custody, fund administration, securities lending).
The institutional book is 3,100 clients — public and corporate pensions, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, endowments — and investment consultants gatekeep roughly 60% of new mandates. A design note, stated plainly: An asset manager, not a hedge fund: Fortune-50 scale requires it, and the mandate pipeline maps one-to-one onto opportunity management while onboarding/KYC and client service give three demoable workloads from one data model.
The deal
“Contoso Financial — Institutional Client Platform Modernization,” estimated $18M ACV, stage Solution Validation. Products in play: D365 Sales, D365 Customer Service, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot. The compete is a 14-year-old heavily customized legacy CRM ("ClientTrack", fictional) plus one horizontal SaaS CRM on the shortlist. Prior Microsoft footprint: M365 E5, Azure commitment, Teams standard; no Business Apps.
Incumbent renewal in 11 months — the clock every lesson references.
The room
Priya Raman
Global Head of Institutional Distribution
Sponsor. Win rate on competed mandates, and "why did we lose the Meridian global-equity mandate".
Tom Okafor
EVP Client Technology
Economic buyer. Platform consolidation, not rebuilding ClientTrack's 400 customizations.
Elena Vasquez
Head of Client Service
SLAs, the quarterly-reporting crunch, reps swivel-chairing six systems.
Dan Whitfield
Director, Client Onboarding & KYC Ops
The 92-day cycle, audit findings on refresh backlog.
Sarah Kim
Enterprise Security Architect
Gatekeeper. "What can these agents actually touch."
Marcus Bell
Account Executive (Microsoft)
Owns the opportunity; works the room with the reader.
The engagement is carried from discovery session through demo delivery to debrief across the five parts of the roadmap. This page is spoiler-free of what discovery finds and what the demo shows — those land in their lessons.