Morgan Stanley and Microsoft have announced a strategic cloud partnership aimed at accelerating the bank’s digital transformation.

Morgan Stanley’s technology teams will use Microsoft Azure, which Microsoft said would help the bank solve challenges specific to the financial services industry.

The partnership will involve developing and co-designing a new application infrastructure which will aim to meet the “key requirements 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.

According to Microsoft, the partnership aims to aid the acceleration of the bank’s digital transformation, which is aligned with its cloud-first and multi-cloud strategy. This, it said, would result in a more modern, flexible, and scalable environment with the transition of workloads onto Microsoft Azure.

The tech giant also said that the deal would see an enhanced employee and developer experience by building “innovative solutions with cloud-native services for faster implementation of apps.”

The companies’ engineers will also collaborate on requirements and capabilities across the latest technology to drive client- and business-centric innovation in financial services.

“This partnership is a natural extension of our longstanding engineering relationship and strong collaborative bond forged in the enterprise space over the past decades,” said Rob Rooney, head of technology, operations & firm resilience at Morgan Stanley. “As we co-develop to shape the future of the cloud, Morgan Stanley will share its deep domain knowledge and engineering expertise to address the complexities of a global regulated financial industry, and help Microsoft enhance its cloud offering to stay at the forefront of client-centric innovation.”

Microsoft said that the partnership will also shape the broader Microsoft product offering and create additional collaboration opportunities in the financial services industry.

The teams will also jointly work on enhancing subsequent adoption of Microsoft GitHub, enabling Morgan Stanley to use a fully integrated cloud SaaS-based development environment and DevOps toolchain.

“As one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, financial services organisations’ journey to the cloud is extremely complex and nuanced,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “Bringing together Morgan Stanley’s financial services engineering expertise with Microsoft’s cloud and industry-specific experience, our partnership will empower innovation for the industry while ensuring stringent compliance and regulatory guidelines are met.”

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