US investment bank Morgan Stanley has formed a strategic cloud partnership with Microsoft to drive its innovation internally and that of the wider financial services industry.
Microsoft is providing the investment bank with a secure and compliant platform that will accelerate its cloud transformation across natively integrated platforms to improve the developer experience.
Through the partnership, the two entities will also focus on co-designing an application infrastructure to meet requirements for financial services, accelerating Morgan Stanley’s digital transformation by transitioning workloads onto Microsoft Azure, and developing cloud-native solutions.
The partnership will also focus on making data sharing for institutional investors easier through direct cloud access to the Morgan Stanley API portal.
“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.”
European investment bank Deutsche Bank entered into a similar agreement with Google in December last year to employ the services of Google Cloud and speed up its migration onto the cloud.
The multi-year partnership between Deutsche Bank and Google will see Google Cloud reshape the investment bank’s products and services to include a managed cloud applications environment to increase its flexibility.
“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, Cloud + AI at Microsoft.