Elly Yates-Roberts |
Morgan Stanley and Microsoft have announced a strategic loud partnership aimed at accelerating the financial services firm’s digital transformation.
Teams from the two companies will work together to address the challenges of the financial services industry, including dynamic markets, a complex regulatory landscape and increasing cyberthreats. Microsoft is providing Morgan Stanley with the capabilities of its Microsoft Azure platform to aid the firm’s cloud transformation and scale across natively integrated platforms to improve developer experience.
“This partnership is a natural extension of our longstanding engineering relationship and strong collaborative bond forged in the enterprise space over the past decades,” said Rob Rooney, head of technology, operations and firm resilience at Morgan Stanley. “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.”
The companies will develop and co-design new application infrastructure meeting the requirements for financial services and informing product innovations, including for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. They will also aim to create a more flexible and scalable environment with the transition of workloads onto Microsoft Azure, improving the employee experience with Microsoft 365 and collaboration tools, increasing developer effectiveness with cloud-native services, and delivering better service, insights and connectivity to clients.
Finally, they will work to build solutions with cloud-native services for faster implementations of apps. The companies’ engineers will collaborate on requirements and capabilities across new technology to drive innovation in financial services by leveraging Morgan Stanley’s engineering and domain expertise.
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. Among other projects, the teams will jointly work on enhancing subsequent adoption of Microsoft GitHub, enabling Morgan Stanley to leverage a fully integrated cloud software-as-a-service-based development environment and DevOps toolchain.
“As one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, financial services organisations’ journey to the cloud is extremely complex and nuanced,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and AI at Microsoft. “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.”