The Winds of Change Continue to Blow at Morgan Stanley with the Departure of Key Technology Team Leadership Personnel
‘Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride’, might best describe life at Morgan Stanley as last week ushered in another round of dramatic leadership shifts within the organization. Four top Morgan Stanley executives, with key oversite responsibilities for Morgan’s technology platforms and planning, each departed to assume leadership positions at Advizr, a notable financial technology firm offering proprietary planning systems aimed at streamlining and supporting advisor day-to-day responsibilities with cross platform customer management and lead generation technology tools. The transitions of these four top Morgan execs follows closely on the heels of the departure of Morgan’s head of Wealth Management and Technology to Rockefeller Capital Management earlier this month.
This latest round of Morgan technology leadership departures may be harbinger that Morgan is pulling the reigns on what these former tech team leaders felt was necessary to keep up with technology resources and maintain flexibility for future migration and innovations, while actively addressing the logistical and revenue generating needs of the advisors on the front lines.
The apparent sentiment of Morgan, as it relates to technology, poses faulty logic and should serve as an education to other wire-houses and regionals who have hung on to their outdated, albeit expensive, legacy technology systems. The fact is, advisors are seeking a technology wish list of an open architecture platform that uses non-proprietary CRMs, data aggregation, asset allocation, and portfolio rebalancing solutions.
In a day and age where clients, and advisors want instant access to all of their information some firms are finding themselves behind the technology curve. This seems to be the case in many of the top retail wealth management firms that insist on keeping the “back-door” closed to plug in newer, more robust, technology from third-party providers like E-Money, Black-Diamond, Orion, and Addepar, just to name a few.
Perhaps it’s a function of not having the money to keep up with their proprietary technology system, or simply the unwillingness to invest what’s required in today’s competitive landscape. Either way, these firms are being left in the dust by new FINTECH firms coming into the space almost daily. The one-two punches these firms are now starting to get hit with is felt in the real assets these firms have, and that is in the human capital behind their technology systems.
It begs the question, if the financial industry recognizes the importance of technology, as do the advisors themselves, why do large firms feel the need to limit themselves, and their teams, with a bundle of outdated technology systems and processes? Turning a blind eye to what makes an advisor successful is fool-hardy naivete and will result in a continued revolving door at Morgan and firms like it as advisors seek greener pastures where technology is a support to them, not a hinderance.
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