Morgan Stanley becomes first major Wall Street bank to open trillion-dollar wealth management system to AI agents, says: ‘The way we see it…’
Morgan Stanley has decided to open its trillion-dollar wealth management funnel to artificial intelligence (AI). The Wall Street major has said that it will allow AI agents used by corporate clients to directly access data and insights from its stock administration platforms. This will mark one of the earliest examples of a major American bank enabling external AI tools to interact with its systems. The move will allow autonomous AI agents to access data stored on Morgan Stanley’s ShareWorks and Equity Edge platforms without relying on traditional software interfaces designed for human users.According to a CNBC report, Mark Mitchell, chief product officer at Morgan Stanley at Work, confirmed that the bank has already granted limited access to a small group of clients and plans to make the capability available to all 3,400 administration clients by next year. He said, “The way we see it, in a future state, our corporate clients will not be logging into ShareWorks or Equity Edge.”Instead, they’ll be “using agentic AI-powered tools on their desktops within the four walls of their companies, interacting with our platforms in a purely agentic way,” Mitchell added.The development highlights how financial institutions are preparing for a future in which AI agents perform tasks that currently require employees to navigate software platforms manually. While banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have deployed AI agents internally for tasks including software development and productivity improvements, neither firm has publicly announced plans to provide external AI agents with direct access to their platforms.
How AI agents can scale Morgan Stanley’s services
Morgan Stanley believes AI agents could help the bank scale services such as customer support, stock-plan administration, and client onboarding without hiring large numbers of additional employees.To support the rollout, Morgan Stanley is using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard that helps AI models connect to external data sources and software systems.Traditionally, financial institutions have preferred that customers access services through proprietary websites and applications. However, Morgan Stanley believes the value of its business increasingly lies in its data and underlying systems rather than the user interface through which clients access them.Morgan Stanley began working with OpenAI in 2022 and has been among the financial firms experimenting with AI tools across different business units. Software is “at an inflexion point, clearly,” Mitchell said.“The companies that are going to survive in the future are the ones that have proprietary data and business logic, which is the foundation of our offering,” Mitchell said.“The fact that they won’t be logging into” the websites, he said, “doesn’t scare us at all.”Apart from this, Morgan Stanley’s workplace division has become an important source of assets for the firm’s wealth management operations. During its April earnings update, the bank said its workplace strategy had helped gather $1.2 trillion in assets.The company’s growth has come through acquisitions, with Solium Capital in 2019 and E-trade in 2020. According to the bank, Morgan Stanley uses these two platforms to manage stock compensation plans for thousands of firms, including nearly 50% of S&P 500 companies.This way, Morgan Stanley can develop contacts within corporations that offer stock-based remuneration and convert them into clients when they become financially endowed.Mitchell said the growing complexity of stock compensation plans has increased demand for automation, particularly among technology and biotechnology companies seeking to manage these programs without significantly expanding their support teams.
