Morgan Stanley to open wealth management funnel to agents

morgan stanley It will soon open up key wealth management funnels to artificial intelligence agents for thousands of companies, CNBC has exclusively learned. This was one of the earliest instances of a major Wall Street bank opening up its platform to outside AI tools.

Mark Mitchell, chief product officer at Morgan Stanley at Work, said the move will allow clients’ autonomous agents to bypass traditional software interfaces built for human users and pull data and insights directly from the firm’s equity management platforms, ShareWorks and Equity Edge.

In April, Morgan Stanley executives said $1.2 trillion in amassed assets were thanks to the company’s workplace strategy.

“Our view is that in the future state, our enterprise customers will no longer be logging into ShareWorks or Equity Edge,” Mitchell said.

Instead, they will “use agent AI-powered tools on their desktops within the four walls of their companies and interact with our platform in a purely agentic way,” he said.

Mitchell said the bank has already granted early agent access to a small number of customers and plans to open it to its 3,400 managed customers by next year.

It’s the latest sign that Wall Street is preparing for a future in which AI agents handle tasks currently performed by software users.

including rivals JP Morgan Chase and goldman sachs Companies use AI agents internally for things like writing code, but they haven’t yet published steps to allow external agents to connect directly to their systems.

Morgan Stanley has turned the staid business of managing stock-based compensation plans for corporations into a vital funnel for its wealth management division, the world’s largest with $7.35 trillion in client assets.

The company acquired Solium Capital in 2019 and E-Trade in 2020, building a business that serves nearly half of the S&P 500 companies and eight of the 10 unicorn startups. A key insight from this was that by managing employee stock plans, Morgan Stanley could turn employees into advisory clients as their assets grew.

Mitchell said the bank’s pitch for AI to its corporate customers is straightforward: Fast-growing technology and biotech companies want to manage increasingly complex equity plans without adding staff in support roles such as human resources.

For these companies, AI agents can handle various aspects of work without adding human employees, he said.

There is a similar logic within the company. Morgan Stanley believes agent AI will allow it to expand its services, such as customer support, plan management and wealth management funnels, without adding “thousands” of employees, Mitchell said.

For this change, Morgan Stanley is relying on something called the Model Context Protocol, an open source standard that allows AI models to be plugged into data sources.

In a pre-AI world, companies would have frowned upon allowing clients to bypass online front doors to access their services. For decades, companies have been fighting to attract users to their platforms.

Morgan Stanley, which began its partnership with OpenAI in 2022, believes that is less important in a world where AI agents are the primary interface. Software is “clearly at an inflection point,” Mitchell said.

“The companies that will survive in the future are the ones that have their own data and business logic that is the foundation of our services,” Mitchell said.

“The fact that they don’t log into the website doesn’t scare us at all,” he said.