Morgan Stanley is set to reportedly open its key stock administration platforms, ShareWorks and Equity Edge, to autonomous AI agents from thousands of corporations.
The move marks one of the earliest moves by a major Wall Street bank to grant external AI tools direct access to its systems, reported CNBC.
The initiative allows clients’ AI agents to pull data and insights directly from the platforms, bypassing traditional human interfaces, according to Mark Mitchell, chief product officer of Morgan Stanley at Work.
“In the future state, our corporate clients will not be logging into ShareWorks or Equity Edge,” Mitchell said.
Instead, they will use agentic AI tools within their own companies to interact with Morgan Stanley’s platforms in a purely agent-to-system manner.
The bank has already provided early access to a small group of clients and plans to roll it out to all 3,400 administration clients by next year, as per the report.
While rivals such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are deploying AI agents internally for tasks like code writing, they have not yet publicly announced direct external agent access to their systems.
Morgan Stanley has transformed the administration of employee stock compensation plans into an entry point for its wealth management division, holding $7.35tn in client assets.
Through the 2019 acquisition of Solium Capital and the 2020 purchase of E-Trade, the firm now serves stock plans for nearly half of S&P 500 companies and eight of the 10 largest unicorn startups.
The strategy converts employees into wealth management clients as their equity wealth grows.
Mitchell said fast-growing tech and biotech companies seek to manage increasingly complex stock plans without expanding human resources teams. AI agents can handle much of the workload.
The same logic applies internally, enabling Morgan Stanley to scale customer support, plan administration, and the wealth funnel without adding “thousands and thousands” of employees, added the report.
The bank is implementing the change through the Model Context Protocol, an open-source standard that lets AI models connect to data sources.
A partner with OpenAI since 2022, Morgan Stanley views the shift as a major inflection point.
“The companies that are going to survive in the future are the ones who have proprietary data and business logic, which is the foundation of our offering,” Mitchell said.
US banking majors are increasingly pivoting towards AI.
In May, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon said the bank is expected to recruit more workers with AI expertise and “fewer” conventional bankers as the technology becomes more widely used, according to a report by Bloomberg.
