Morgan Stanley to open its wealth management funnel to agents
Morgan Stanley’s office in the Canary Wharf financial district on January 30, 2025, London, England.
Mike Kemp | In pictures | Getty Images
Morgan Stanley A major asset management funnel will soon be opened to AI representatives of thousands of companies, CNBC has learned exclusively. This is one of the first examples of a major Wall Street bank opening up its platforms to external AI tools.
The move will allow customers’ autonomous agents to receive data and insights directly from the firm’s equity management platforms ShareWorks and Equity Edge, bypassing traditional software interfaces built for human users. mark mitchellchief product officer Morgan Stanley at Work.
In April, Morgan Stanley executives attributed $1.2 trillion in assets raised to its workplace strategy.
“Going forward, our enterprise customers will not log into ShareWorks or Equity Edge,” Mitchell said.
Instead, “they will use agency AI-powered tools on their desktops within the four walls of their companies and interact with our platforms in a completely agency way,” he said.
The bank already grants early agent access to a handful of clients and plans to open it to the firm’s 3,400 executive clients by next year, Mitchell said.
It’s the latest sign that Wall Street is preparing for a future in which AI agents will perform tasks now performed by software users.
Including competitors JPMorgan Chase And Goldman Sachs It uses AI agents internally for things like writing code, but they have yet to publicly announce steps that would allow external agents to connect directly to their firm’s systems.
Morgan Stanley asset management
Morgan Stanley has taken the job of managing stock compensation plans for companies seriously and turned it into a crucial funnel for the firm’s wealth management division, which is the world’s largest in terms of client assets at $7.35 trillion.
The firm acquired Solium Capital in 2019 and E-Trade in 2020, creating a business that appeals to nearly half of the companies in the S&P 500 and eight of the 10 largest companies. unicorn startups. His key insight was that by managing employee stock plans, Morgan Stanley could turn employees into advisory clients as their wealth increased.
The bank’s AI offering for enterprise clients is pretty simple: Fast-growing tech and biotech companies want to manage increasingly complex inventory plans without adding headcount to support roles like human resources, Mitchell said.
At these companies, AI representatives can handle some aspects of the job without adding human employees, he said.
There’s similar logic internally: Mitchell sees Morgan Stanley’s agency AI allowing it to scale its own services (client support, plan management, wealth management funnel) without adding “thousands and thousands” of employees.
For this change, Morgan Stanley is relying on something called the Model Context Protocol, an open-source standard that allows AI models to connect to data sources.
In a pre-AI world, companies wouldn’t allow customers to access their services through the online front door. For decades, companies have struggled to attract users to proprietary platforms.
Morgan Stanley, which began a partnership with OpenAI in 2022, believes this is less important in a world where AI agents become the primary interface. The software is “clearly at an inflection point,” Mitchell said.
“The companies that will survive in the future are those with the proprietary data and business logic that is the foundation of our offering,” Mitchell said.
“The fact that they won’t be able to access websites doesn’t scare us at all,” he said.
