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Business Insider
06-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
I toured Morgan Stanley's Innovation Lab and saw firsthand how banks are trying to pull top tech talent
Though Morgan Stanley 's Innovation Lab sits firmly in Manhattan's Financial District, I hardly saw any of the finance bros who dot the streets outside during my recent tour. I didn't know quite what to expect ahead of my visit — robots analyzing market moves? intricate gadgets? — and Megan Brewer, the head of firmwide market innovation and labs, tempered my wildest expectations when she described the space as "effectively a very large data center." The lab, she said, gives people "all the infrastructure that is needed to test ideas in a secure, scalable fashion." Morgan Stanley employees who want to experiment with their own ideas or test third-party products that might help the firm can use the Innovation Lab. Brewer told me that most of the people who use the space are technologists, but that everyone at the bank has access. "Most people don't think of banks as where people are sitting there soldering and working on custom design trips," she said. "But we offer that as well." Morgan Stanley is sure to celebrate innovators And it became clear to me that Brewer's team is pulling multiple levers to attract and retain the firm's technologists. She helps run the bank's Patent Accelerator Program, which guides innovators through the patent process. When someone's invention earns a patent, Brewer's team sends a message to their manager. They post on internal sites, frame the physical patent, and note the accomplishment on the person's company profile. Morgan Stanley has even put patent-holders' faces on their digital ads in Times Square, Brewer said. Patents don't only grant legal control over an invention, but also acknowledge something as a creative, genuinely new idea. Inventions have to be "non-obvious" to get a patent, and they're a quantitative way for banks to flex their technological chops. Banks are generally racing to embrace the newest technology. A McKinsey report from late 2024 found that banks have massively increased their tech spending in recent years, and are especially focused on hiring people to produce products in-house. While tech companies are cutting back on new-hire offers, my time at Morgan Stanley made it clear that banks might be keen on snapping up some of the available talent. Citi also has a network of physical innovation labs across the world, and many banks have accelerator or innovation programs. When we were ready to enter the lab, Brewer told me I might need to leave my notebook behind, since it's flammable. The first room, though, seemed pretty innocuous: a bunch of computers with black screens, and a lone guy sitting at a desktop. I almost felt like I was in a "Black Mirror" episode, the rows of blank monitors a dystopian end-of-world tableau. The lab was full of high-end, deceptively plain machines As we kept moving through the lab, the image of a stereotypical bank continued to fade. It was hot and loud inside the data center, with a white noise of whirring machines and fluorescent lighting. Brewer advised me to stand on a vent if I got too hot amid the rows of equipment. Most of the time, I didn't know what I was looking at — at one point, it turned out to be the lab's first GPU. I asked how much it was all was worth, and everyone laughed, saying I didn't want to know. "Many millions," Brewer said, adding that some pieces cost as much as rent on a New York City apartment. (I became very conscious of not stepping on the many blue wires grazing the floor in my kitten heels.) Huge investment aside, though, some parts of the lab seemed almost scrappy, evidence of exploration and technology that's still in the works. There were labels made of blue tape and Sharpie, stickers that looked like they came from a name-tag machine, flame-retardant Post-Its. At the end of the tour, I met an electrical engineer, who was standing in front of a clearly very complex, very impressive machine he'd made. My tour guide told me that he'd already built and patented multiple versions of the chip machine sitting before us, which he was too polite to mention himself. He carefully explained his project — Morgan Stanley asked that don't get into specifics here — and indulged my many questions, talking to me in what were likely excruciatingly simple terms. When I asked whether he ever expected to work at a bank, I got an emphatic no and some knowing head-nods from those leading my tour. Morgan Stanley has around 23,000 tech employees, 15,000 of whom are developers. At the time of this writing, the bank had 249 full-time technology jobs listed on its site. The lines between banking and Big Tech I didn't talk to, or maybe even see, a single banker the whole time I was there, which makes some sense given that Morgan Stanley's main New York headquarters are in Midtown and I was at a smaller office downtown. People talked in the terms of a startup, pushing themes like innovation that may appeal to an engineer more than the average investment banker. We eventually left the lab and emerged into a similarly harshly lit hallway, the walls lined with cardboard boxes, before passing through a door and into the shinier, more central office area. I stepped into the bathroom before leaving; it was designed in the crisp image of the finance aesthetic, with a few cubbies holding hair straighteners. Looking around, I remembered where I was: a bank at the tip of Manhattan, not a tech company in California. I wondered, though, how the lines between the two will continue to blur — and how much they've blurred already.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A team of engineers saved Morgan Stanley more than 280,000 hours this year. The bank says their tool won't take jobs.
Morgan Stanley's newly patented tool was developed in-house and released in January. The bank says it has saved almost 300,000 hours this year alone but won't replace developers' jobs. solves a long-standing headache for coders within and beyond Morgan Stanley. During a Morgan Stanley hackathon at the end of 2023, two teams were trying to solve a problem that has plagued developers for years: how to rewrite legacy code into modern programming languages. Those nuggets of an idea turned into a tool the bank unveiled in January that has so far saved developers more than 280,000 hours as of June, or 11,666 days they would have previously dedicated to deciphering outdated code, said Trevor Brosnan, the bank's global head of technology strategy, architecture, and modernization. Brosnan led the effort to build the tool, which turns code from old languages into plain-English specs that can then be rewritten. Legacy code refers to outdated, older software code — think of languages such as Cobol, which was developed in 1959 — that can raise security risks and slow down how quickly companies can take advantage of new technology, as The Wall Street Journal reported. Banks and financial institutions are especially dependent on older programming languages, the Journal said. "In early 2024, I pulled some of our top distinguished engineers at the firm out of their line of business teams and into a new applied AI team, because my instincts told me that there was some great opportunity here," Brosnan told Business Insider. His instincts were right — the tool has exceeded even his high expectations. It was granted a patent in early June with assistance from the bank's Patent Accelerator Program, which Megan Brewer, the head of firmwide market innovation and labs, helped start. Brewer and Brosnan said wouldn't take software engineering or other jobs with the time it saves. The technology, Brewer said, replaces "onerous" rote work. "That means those people can actually go work on what we need to be working on, which is the future," she said. AI presents opportunities throughout the firm, Brewer said, and Morgan Stanley is looking into how it can use agentic AI across teams. "The reality is we have so much modernization work to do, and we have ongoing demand from all of our businesses to deliver more functionality, more capability for our clients," Brosnan said. Young people are struggling to land quality positions in the tech sector in particular, and AI is already starting to gobble up jobs across industries. White-collar job postings nationwide are shrinking faster than blue-collar listings, including for software developers. Still, Brewer and Brosnan were adamant that wouldn't render developers obsolete. Morgan Stanley had 233 technology jobs in the Americas posted on its website at the time of writing, including dozens of openings for software engineers. Not many of the technologists at the bank worked on — Brosnan said the initial team was fewer than five people "who are passionate about this." Eventually, the core group expanded to about 20 engineers. Throughout the process, they consulted with subject matter experts across the firm to figure out different use cases for the tool, Brosnan said. Morgan Stanley could have outsourced the development of the tool, but Brosnan said they decided to develop it internally in part to "implement all the kinds of security controls." Now, he said, employees across divisions, from its institutional to wealth management businesses, are using the tool. "Even within the world of generative AI, this was a very, very, very clever use of it, but it also was extremely impactful," said Larry Bromberg, the global head of intellectual property legal, who co-leads the Patent Acceleration Program. Pleased as he is with the result, Brosnan said his team very briefly celebrated their successes. "Frankly, they are still very focused on their day job. Our mission is to accelerate modernization at Morgan Stanley, and we've still got lots of work to do," he said. One cause for celebration was receiving a patent, which Morgan Stanley employees are encouraged to do through the Patent Accelerator Program. Brewer said the program provides support throughout the invention and legal process. Patent-holders span the firm — there are about 500 across 14 different divisions, Brewer said. From 2023 to 2024, the Patent Accelerator Program increased final submissions to patent offices by 53%, and Brewer said they'd "definitely" surpass that this year. Brewer said 20% of patent holders were junior staff, and 10% were distinguished engineers. One of the lead engineers on the team is something of a serial patent recipient, or a "serial offender" as Brewer put it, with 13 patents to date. Brosnan said the team didn't have immediate plans to license the newly patented tool externally; it would probably be in high demand given how many financial and Big Tech companies have to deal with outdated coding languages. "Right now, our plan is to leverage this definitely for all of our modernization demands internally. We haven't decided anything different from that," he said, adding that Morgan Stanley had shared technology with peers in the past. In the meantime, the question of how to use AI and modernize the bank isn't going anywhere. As Brosnan put it, his technologists are back to "hands-on keyboards" after every win. 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Business Insider
01-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
A team of engineers saved Morgan Stanley more than 280,000 hours this year. The bank says their tool won't take jobs.
During a Morgan Stanley hackathon at the end of 2023, two teams were trying to solve a problem that has plagued developers for years: how to rewrite legacy code into modern programming languages. Those nuggets of an idea turned into a tool the bank unveiled in January that has so far saved developers more than 280,000 hours as of June, or 11,666 days they would have previously dedicated to deciphering outdated code, according to Trevor Brosnan, the bank's global head of technology strategy, architecture, and modernization. Brosnan led the effort to build the tool, which turns code from old languages into plain-English specs that can then be rewritten. Legacy code refers to outdated, older software code — think of languages like Cobol, which was developed in 1959 — that can raise security risks and slow down how quickly companies can take advantage of new technology, The Wall Street Journal reported. Banks and financial institutions are especially dependent on older programming languages, per the Journal. "In early 2024, I pulled some of our top distinguished engineers at the firm out of their line of business teams and into a new applied AI team, because my instincts told me that there was some great opportunity here," Brosnan told BI. His instincts were right — the tool has exceeded even his high expectations. It was granted a patent in early June with assistance from the bank's Patent Accelerator Program, which Megan Brewer, the head of firmwide market innovation and labs, helped start. Cutting out 'onerous' work, not jobs Brewer and Brosnan said that won't take software engineering or other jobs with the time it saves. The technology, Brewer said, replaces "onerous" rote work. "That means those people can actually go work on what we need to be working on, which is the future," she said. Brewer said AI presents opportunities throughout the firm, and that Morgan Stanley is currently looking into how it can use agentic AI across teams. "The reality is we have so much modernization work to do, and we have ongoing demand from all of our businesses to deliver more functionality, more capability for our clients," Brosnan told BI. Young people are struggling to land quality positions in the tech sector, in particular, and AI is already starting to gobble up jobs across industries. White-collar job postings nationwide are shrinking faster than blue-collar listings, including for software developers. Still, Brewer and Brosnan were adamant that won't render developers obsolete. Morgan Stanley had 233 technology jobs in the Americas posted on its website at the time of writing, including dozens of openings for software engineers. The initial team for was tiny Not many of the technologists at the bank worked on — Brosnan said the initial team was fewer than five people "who are passionate about this." Eventually, the core group expanded to around 20 engineers. Throughout the process, they consulted with subject matter experts across the firm to figure out different use cases for the tool, Brosnan said. Morgan Stanley could have outsourced the development of the tool, but Brosnan said they decided to develop it internally in part to "implement all the kinds of security controls." Now, he said, employees across divisions, from its institutional to wealth management businesses, are using the tool. "Even within the world of generative AI, this was a very, very, very clever use of it, but it also was extremely impactful," said Larry Bromberg, the global head of intellectual property legal, who co-leads the Patent Acceleration Program. Pleased as he is with the result, Brosnan said his team very briefly celebrated their successes. "Frankly, they are still very focused on their day job. Our mission is to accelerate modernization at Morgan Stanley, and we've still got lots of work to do," he told BI. The technology will stay internal for now One cause for celebration was receiving a patent, which Morgan Stanley employees are encouraged to do through the Patent Accelerator Program. Brewer said the program provides support throughout the invention and legal process. Patent-holders span the firm — there are around 500 across 14 different divisions, Brewer said. From 2023-2024, the Patent Accelerator Program increased final submissions to patent offices by 53%, and Brewer said that they'll "definitely" surpass that this year. Brewer said that 20% of patent holders are junior staff, and 10% are distinguished engineers. One of the lead engineers on the team is something of a serial patent recipient, or a "serial offender" as Brewer put it, with 13 patents to date. Brosnan said the team doesn't have immediate plans to license the newly patented tool externally; it would likely be in high demand given how many financial and Big Tech companies have to deal with outdated coding languages. "Right now, our plan is to leverage this definitely for all of our modernization demands internally. We haven't decided anything different from that," he said, adding that Morgan Stanley has shared technology with peers in the past. In the meantime, the question of how to use AI and modernize the bank isn't going anywhere. As Brosnan put it, his technologists are back to "hands-on keyboards" after every win.
