Microsoft and Morgan Stanley have entered into a cloud partnership to unlock the opportunities that Microsoft’s cloud provides with a specific view toward the challenges of financial services and enabling Morgan Stanley to accelerate the modernization of its IT environment to enhance client, employee and developer experiences.

Microsoft is providing Morgan Stanley with a secure and compliant platform with data privacy at the center that will fuel the firm’s cloud transformation and scale across natively integrated platforms to improve developer experience to drive innovation.

As part of the strategic partnership, the companies will focus on developing and co-designing new application infrastructure meeting the key requirements for financial services and informing product innovations including for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, bringing together common data models, cross-cloud connectors, workflows, APIs, and financial industry-specific components and standards.

The partnership will also help accelerate Morgan Stanley’s digital transformation aligned with the firm’s cloud- first and multi-cloud strategy, resulting in a modern, more flexible and scalable environment with the transition of workloads onto Microsoft Azure; improved employee experience with Microsoft 365 and collaboration tools; higher developer effectiveness and innovation power with cloud-native services; and better service, insights and connectivity to clients.

The companies’ engineers will also collaborate on requirements and capabilities across the latest technology to drive client- and business-centric innovation in financial services in faster and more flexible ways by leveraging Morgan Stanley’s deep engineering and domain expertise.