Morgan Stanley wants to roll out a 'cheat sheet' for financial advisers to help analyze news and data about portfolio holdings
- Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is planning a new digital feature for its force of 15,000-plus financial advisers designed to better help them spot risks in clients' portfolios in an immediate way.
- The tool, which the firm wants to roll out in 2020, will consider news headlines and other information to help advisers quickly gauge portfolio risk.
- Chris Scott-Hansen, managing director and head of portfolio and trading solutions, spoke with Business Insider about these plans.
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Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is developing a new tool for its 15,000-plus financial advisers that will help them wade through news and other information and frame it in terms of client portfolio risks and opportunities.
Morgan Stanley, among the largest US wealth managers, is working to deploy a new feature that would act as a "cheat sheet," according to Chris Scott-Hansen, managing director and head of portfolio and trading solutions at Morgan Stanley.
It would help advisers summarize data, including news headlines, that is relevant to their clients' holdings, and would be housed on a dashboard that all the firm's financial advisers already have access to.
"You come in in the morning for your cup of coffee and you know exactly - no matter how many clients, or how many strategies, or how many positions in your book - here's what you need to know today," Scott-Hansen said in an interview this week with Business Insider at the firm's New York headquarters.
The goal of the tool is to help advisers quickly gauge portfolio risk and not be caught "off-guard," he said.
Morgan Stanley plans to call its new feature "Business Insights," Scott-Hansen said. Advisers already have access to various news services, he said, along with alerts from the firm's research group.
Scott-Hansen's plan for these "quick insights" underscores a broader trend in the wealth management industry. Big wirehouses are under pressure to upgrade legacy technology, particularly as new, low-cost roboadvisers up the game for what can be expected on the client-facing side from self-serve options.
In-house tech tools are also a key focus for the advisers themselves - in August, we talked to Paul Vienick, head of digital client platforms at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, who said that one of the first questions from prospective advisers is usually: "What is your technology like?"
The new feature's first elements will roll out during 2020. The wirehouse will also unveil new, client-facing, elements beyond the current reporting capabilities next year. Morgan Stanley did not detail what those changes would be.
Morgan Stanley - which at the end of June had 15,633 advisers overseeing some $2.5 trillion in client assets - partners with the asset manager BlackRock and its Aladdin investment management technology to power Morgan Stanley's risk analytics platform.
Aladdin - short for Asset Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network - is software that BlackRock sells to investment managers to help them assess risks around client portfolios. Meanwhile BlackRock's Aladdin Wealth gives wealth management firms a client-level risk perspective.
BlackRock has seen wealth managers as an important pool of Aladdin users, and has been signing big wealth managers around the world up to the wealth version of the platform. Wealth manager and investment bank UBS, as well as HSBC, also partner with BlackRock on its Aladdin technology.
Morgan Stanley went live to all financial advisers with risk management for client portfolios in late 2018, which allows the advisers to do things like run stress tests against client holdings and analyze various aspects like country and factor exposures.
"Our risk analytics technology is now fully integrated into the adviser platform, allowing our advisers to provide real-time risk analytics in a way that no other provider can," Morgan Stanley chief financial officer Jonathan Pruzan said at an industry conference in New York last month, adding the firm has found it's acquired more client assets this way.
The technology also gives advisers oversight into brokerage accounts, and helps flag potential risks for those clients, potentially building a case for transitioning into financial advice. Another aspect that can help drive business is the platform's ability to display all client assets, including what's held away from the bank, in order to paint an overall risk picture.
The firm has been looking to ways to digitize adviser-client interactions. In late July, Morgan Stanley launched a digital document sharing tool for wealth management in partnership with cloud software company Box.
Offering the best technology is now "table stakes" for holding onto assets and advisers alike, industry recruiters and executives have told Business Insider.
And while many argue that there will be no full tech replacement for human advice, particularly when it comes to meeting the complex needs of the ultra-wealthy, the head of private banking at UBS told us in August that even he's looking for ways for digital offerings to "do more" when it comes to the bank's richest clients.
