When we need to create Proof of Concepts, test products that we need to implement for our projects and or provide demos to our clients, at many times consultants and even partners use demo environments and products provided by Microsoft (and other organizations) in order to assist them in these cases.
I am currently working on a project for a Financial Organization where we are using a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Demo tenant from the Microsoft Customer Digital Experiences portal with. This type of tenant comes with 25 Office 365 E5 licenses and 25 Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Licenses (which includes Sales, Customer Services, Customer Service Insights, Field Services and Project Service Automation). As part of this demo tenant we also installed the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services trial, which is available via the aka.ms/FSITrial link. This link is Microsoft Forms page, where you enter your email address and tenant url, and get a promotional code for the trial environment where you can add to your trial tenant (for 30 days).
This was working great until a few weeks ago, but something happened with the Promo codes, and although you could still fill out the page on Microsoft Forms, when you got the email with the link, the link would return an error that the promotional code is invalid. I have contacted Microsoft regarding this issue, and they are currently working on a fix, but the timeframe for this has not been determined yet, and what happens if you need this now, and can’t wait for this fix.
Depending on the solution that you are looking for, you might have a workaround. In our case, we were using the Unified Customer Profile (for Retain Banking) components and needed to have these available. If we go to the Microsoft Learn website we will find that there are two separate pages for Unified Customer Profile
The Unified client profile for wealth management is still in preview, but if you look at these two pages, you will notice that all of the components that make the Unified customer profile for retail banking are also available in the Unified client profile for wealth management. The versions of these two products are slightly different, but only by a single release, and there should not be any issue getting your retail banking solution deployed in a wealth management preview environment. In the image below you can see the components that we installed as part of the Wealth Management app, and see that the Retail Banking Core Controls and Retain Banking Core Components are part of this instance where we installed the Wealth Management app.
So, how does this help us. It seems like that as part of the CDX tenant that is currently being provisioned, some of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Service apps are enabled in the tenant and can be installed on any one of the instances that are created in this tenant. The image below shows you the components. Although, I am not sure you can get all the features of MCFS installed, you can definitely get some of them.
Once you get these apps installed you can leverage the new app that is available in your instance, or import or a previously created app. You will then be able to see your Unified Customer Profile app and navigate to it as shown in the image below:
I hope that if you encountered this issue, this post helped you with a temporary solution until Microsoft can provide a fix for the FSITrial availability.