Morgan Stanley announces new strategic cloud partnership with Microsoft

By Pavithra R

Morgan Stanley and Microsoft has announced entering into a strategic cloud partnership to accelerate the firm’s digital transformation and shaping the future of innovation in the financial services industry.

The companies will strike a unique collaboration to unlock the opportunities that Microsoft’s cloud provides with a specific view toward the challenges of financial services and enabling Morgan Stanley to accelerate the modernization of its IT environment to enhance client, employee and developer experiences.

By bringing together the power of the Microsoft Azure and Morgan Stanley Technology teams, the alliance will tap into both companies’ deep engineering expertise to solve challenges within the highly regulated financial services industry. Microsoft is providing Morgan Stanley with a secure and compliant platform with data privacy at the center that will fuel the firm’s cloud transformation and scale across natively integrated platforms to dramatically improve developer experience to drive innovation.

“This partnership is a natural extension of our longstanding engineering relationship and strong collaborative bond forged in the enterprise space over the past decades. As we co-develop to shape the future of the cloud, Morgan Stanley will share its deep domain knowledge and engineering expertise to address the complexities of a global regulated financial industry, and help Microsoft enhance its cloud offering to stay at the forefront of client-centric innovation,” said Rob Rooney, head of Technology, Operations & Firm Resilience at Morgan Stanley.

As part of the partnership, the companies will focus on the following:

• Develop and co-design new application infrastructure meeting the key requirements for financial services and informing product innovations bringing together common data models, cross-cloud connectors, workflows, APIs, and financial industry-specific components and standards.
• Accelerate Morgan Stanley’s digital transformation aligned with the firm’s cloud-first and multi-cloud strategy, resulting in a modern, more flexible and scalable environment with the transition of workloads onto Microsoft Azure; improved employee experience with Microsoft 365 and collaboration tools; higher developer effectiveness and innovation power with cloud-native services; and better service, insights and connectivity to clients.
• Enhance the employee and developer experience by building innovative solutions with cloud-native services for faster implementation of apps. The companies’ engineers will also collaborate on requirements and capabilities across the latest technology to drive client- and business-centric innovation in financial services by leveraging Morgan Stanley’s deep engineering and domain expertise.

“As one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, financial services organizations’ journey to the cloud is extremely complex and nuanced. Bringing together Morgan Stanley’s financial services engineering expertise with Microsoft’s cloud and industry-specific experience, our partnership will empower innovation for the industry while ensuring stringent compliance and regulatory guidelines are met,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft.

The scope of the partnership extends beyond the cloud. The partnership will also shape the broader Microsoft product offering and create additional collaboration opportunities in the financial services industry focused on the modern workplace and the broader developer experience.