financial representative

associate

registered client associate

vice president

financial advisor

Morgan Stanley

First and foremost, Morgan Stanley is a great name brand and a good place to start your career in technology. You will learn about how to deploy technologies and ultimately work with various stakeholders, internally and externally.

Since Indeed asks for a complete and honest review, I will also share some of my Areas of improvement thoughts on the company culture. When I first joined Morgan, I was really excited to be joining a company that I believed valued its people-- that's what I was constantly told in the beginning by senior executives giving speeches at the Technology Analyst Program, and it's what I told other people as well. 

Morgan Stanley hires young tech talent, but as an industry and as a culture, it fails short in the following ways:

1.) Toxic culture and lack of accountability:

Toxic coworkers: Be prepared to meet some really angry and passive aggressive older generation at work that are competitive and will backstab you, steal your work, lie about your personality, or lie to you. 

Harassment: If you are a female, be prepared to be silenced and discounted by HR if you report any kind of harassment issues. I feel sad writing this, because I wish it weren't true. No one wants to be the person who experiences this kind of toxicity and have to tell anyone. It's even worse when people make you feel isolated for it. The symptoms of a toxic culture and lack of accountability.   

2.) Technology is still back office, seen as an expense, not revenue generating. 

As much as MS likes to say they are investing in technology, it's still considered a back office expense. If you are lucky, you will be able to work on a project that has high visibility such as client facing web applications, but even then don't expect to receive recognition for it unless you work on the business side, which is its own political hierarchy. In terms of challenging projects, most of tech talent meanders around debugging code in legacy systems, and wanting more challenge from their work. 

3.) Long work days + Learning and development: Many people seek to learn new technology skills, but the company does not provide options for technology associates to learn. For developers, this is essential to your every day career. You have to learn new skills. For a company, this is essential to keep and retain talent. No one becomes an Artificial Intelligence expert by taking a few theoretical classes on the Internet. They need to learn what AI is through coding, experimentation, and applying it at work. As a technologist, you end up staying at work for several extra hours each day to do something that could have been done faster if you had access to courses that helped guide your learning. Beyond saving you time, it also saves the company time. MS does not support this kind of learning or see the value in it. They blame its engineers for staying late, thinking that it's because the engineers forgot to do something or whatever. It's because the engineers have to wait for all the excessive business meetings to end and for the stable coding and testing environments to be set up for them to test their actual applications. It's a frustrating work culture to be in when you can't do your work and people don't understand the technical reasons why that is. 

4.) Mentorship: Mentorship happens randomly, and then it fizzles out. I know one person at the company who feels like they have a mentor. Most try to find one, and then get discouraged because the overall attitude towards mentorship is that it's a luxury item that no one can afford-- when in fact, it's a very active part of any person's success at ANY company. People who have a mentor are more likely to feel supported at work and advance in the company. People know this, but the problem is, it's not done at Morgan in a tangible or direct way, so you're on your own to find a mentor, or just do things without a mentor --until you figure out that it's important to have one for advancing in the company. 

4.) Networking and advancement: During my 4 years at the company, I focused on building technologies and creating relationships with people of all backgrounds and ages alike. After spending a lot of time listening to feedback and advice from over 20+ executives that I networked with, the answer to advancing in the career was Tenure + Who you Know at the Table. Other companies are already beginning to understand that tenure and who you know should not be the deciding factor in promotions.

In an interview, I was told that a former assistant abruptly left the company 
without giving prior notice to her superiors (supervisors).  Prior to her, 
another assistant spent a year in the dept., then decided she didn't want to go permanent with that dept.  Historically, executive assistants came & left in the dept. I ended up in.  The turnout was so bad that the Directors who I supported weren't able to hire an executive assistant for a year.  
I thought nothing of this history as I needed to work.  Reflecting on my short-lived experience with that particular dept., I understood why there was such a high turnout: it's a toxic hellhole consisting of deplorable millennials who happen to be Associates/Consultants.

Morgan Stanley, in general, is a reputable company.  However, a section on the floor I worked at was the mirror-image of a local NYC Public High School in Staten Island: 
1.)  You have immature, micro-aggressive, outrageously arrogant and fake Associates who will do ANYTHING to absorb praise & attention over private life matters irrelevant to your job description (I gained NOTHING from their hype as I was NOT friends with any of them, socially they're not my crowd).  They already display grotesques attitudes at you with their evil eyelooks/stares/rolls at you, but if they don't get your praises over their personal-life hype, they'll throw a conversational-tantrum with their cubicle partner & regard you as an Enemy of The State who don't want to socialize with people (*In actuality, it was YOU I did not want to socialize with as I don't associate myself with fake-narcissists!). 

2.)  If you're not careful [you're too nice with everyone at first], you will also soon experience workplace harassment & psychological bullying by certain single male staffers who have not been with the company for that long.  You'll be inappropriately scrutinized & followed whenever you leave your cubicle desk several minutes later.  It got so bad that on 2 occasions, I ended up reporting this offender!

So long as people like these office-adversaries exist in an cubicle setting, you will FOREVER have a high turn-out of Assistants because NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would want to work with them, or be seated very close to them!  I will venture that these specific individuals are THE ROOT CAUSE for the HIGH TURNOUT in that sub-dept. that existed before I got there.  It felt like you're inadvertently (and socially) required to be married with children in order to avoid being inappropriately harassed, PLUS not feel ostracized by the team you were supporting, which happen to include these repulsive, deplorable young married Associates that look down on you like you're beneath them!

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED: The supervisor who'll you report to, if you get the offer, wants Happy People working for that team (where I worked at). If you're single & childless, don't waste you time or pain by applying to this position!  If you find yourself in such a toxic, high-school-like environment like what you've just read, for your sanity's sake --- RUN OUT!!!

Overall, As a temp worker, it's not too bad. Generally, people are friendly and willing to help you when you need it, will give you advice, or will even show you where to find answers. It's a pretty relaxed environment because everyone is pretty in control of their workflow and you're not micromanaged.

The work itself *can* be stressful, reading the borderline moronic, stupid complaints from rude filthy rich incompetent people secondhand was enough to pull on my anxiety on the day-to-day and if you can't learn to detach yourself it will be very taxing for you.

I was promised a full-time position if I kept working in the temp position and doing a good job (as is pretty typical), but when a temp person got promoted to full-time, I asked how long it took them and they said TWO YEARS. Two years of contracted temp work... good grief. I quit shortly after that. Being a temp worker is cool and has its perks, but if you like this job and want to commit, you'll be waiting for a while, and Mr. Morgan Stanley will be pocketing the extra dough from you not being full-time... it's just slimy. Not sure why it isn't full-time at the start. There are no good reasons why it shouldn't be. 

The best part about working this job is people generally left me alone. I'd eat lunch alone, my desk mates would never talk to me, and I would just jam out to my music and sometimes watch youtube videos while I grinded out the work. It was awesome. After a while, my trainer stopped checking in with me daily and there'd be days I wouldn't audibly express a single word. Sometimes people wouldn't even virtually check in with me. Practically felt like my own boss at times, it was pretty rad.

The hardest part was definitely the borderline evil emails from people complaining, that was the worst. I also thought that all of the meetings I ever went to were absolutely pointless, did not care about a single thing we talked about in those. Could have easily put every one of them in an email. I also think their "remote work" policy is dumb. Higher-ups practically said the reason they are making people come to work is that "[their] competitors are", which is a lame reason. 

I also think the structuring of the complaint department is pretty messed up. Most of the time I'd have to communicate with the satellite branches and I hated that because many of them never understood what my job even entailed so sometimes they'd expect me to fix their problem, or they'd think some minor issue was supermassive enough to bring down the whole company, it was exhausting.

It wasn't the angry emails from rich snobs that made me go looking for another job; no, what drove me away was dealing with and having to communicate with people working under Morgan Stanley in the satellite branches. It was very clear to me that there are no universal training manuals to get everyone on the same page, and that made some workplace situations gut-wrenchingly unbearable.

Working at Morgan Stanley has been a great experience.  I would suggest others to take an offer from Morgan Stanley if one is presented.  One of the great things about Morgan Stanley is the flexibility.  There is no such thing as a set schedule.  Most deadlines are spread out over the course of a set period and individuals have ample time to complete the tasks at hand as long as you are disciplined enough to self manager yourself.  The management teams are extremely knowledgeable and always willing to lend a hand when needed. I have learned so much in my time with the firm from an accounting and financial perspective, but also from a professional viewpoint.  I have learned how to take a step back and look at a process to be able to look for was to enhance how things are done today.  Over the course of my career here, I have learned many essential skills that one would need to advance my career.  I have been involved with client invoicing and understanding all the business impact for different products and lines of businesses.  I have been exposed to the expenses paid to internal and external parties that market our funds to investors.  I have become an important part to our teams that generate our forecasts for the future and profitability of our products and services because I now understand how the revenues are offset by our expenses to determine what the firm is actually earning from one product to the next.  The hardest part of the job is understanding who provides all the information we use to complete our responsibilities.  There are a number of teams such as client services, operational services, product management, transfer agencies, and fund accounts where we need to obtain information.  Once one understand where all the information is derived, it makes it easier to understand how all the pieces make up the entire picture of what is done in Morgan Stanley finance.  Lastly, the most enjoyable part of the job is that there is always more that can be learned.  I recently was involved in a project to relocate one of our process centers from one office to another.  No staff was retained from the prior team, but all team members involved have been trained and brought up on how we at Morgan Stanley handle things and it has forced me to be more of a leader.  It is great to feel that sense of accomplishment that you were essential to such a major transition.  I have enjoyed my time with Morgan Stanley and would suggest a career with Morgan Stanley to anyone interested.

Morgan Stanley has been a great place to work but the lack of work life balance has created a negative work environment. You have to be able to have a life out of work and as a person with a young family, this has become more and more of a challenge. I absolutely love working hard but the pendulum has swung too far to that side and there is no balance.  

A typical work day is at least 10 hours, which is very much in line with the industry and most people seem to be very fine with this. I manage a team in Baltimore and also a vendor team in India. A 10 hour work day is an extremely good day. However, typically the average is 11-12 if not more and currently the hours worked by the team over the course of a month is more in line with working 5-6 weeks worth of hours over the month. There is very little work/life balance which is the stressor for most of my team and the department currently. The problem with this is that it is not just a peak over an end of month period of the end of quarter, it has been this way for a year so most people across the department are at breaking point which is what is driving our attrition.

Workload is partially driven by the product you are supporting and also the location, which as a whole is going through a very tough time as there is direct competition and viable options for other employment which is contributing to the attrition. The problem is, it has continue to go through a tough time for a year and despite the Directors being very vocal and active in playing a part to provide options, ideas and plans of how to proceed there is very little coming back down the pipeline from senior management. 

There has been extremely high turn over across the Director and Officer population and the management is very clearly struggling with the impacts of that. Key person dependency which we have trying to avoid is becoming almost impossible to address. The direct impact on myself has meant that there is very little support from senior management for and across the entire Director population. The analyst and associate population are also being severely pressed due to the continued turn-over at that level as well. Workloads continue to increase because the Firm is very successful and business will naturally increase off the back of that. However, with the turn over happening below and above the Directors the role is increasingly challenging across the board feeding into the above points and statements made. 

At the point now where I have to find balance and I cannot find that where I am.

On a typical day as a financial advisor associate you arrive at your office just as or a half hour before the market opens in New York (6:30 AM AZ time during daylight saving time and 7:00 AM otherwise). You spend about an hour catching up on what has happened in the world between the market close yesterday and the market opening that morning. You spend 5 hours, in 1hour blocks, making cold calls, follwoing up with leads, and making warm calls to people you know. The objective each day is to develop leads from cold calls and setting up appointments for face-to face meetings to develop leads into prospects. On 3 nights a week you spend from 5:30 PM until 7:00 or 7:30 PM making cold calls to residences. Every other Saturday you come into the office for half a day to catch up on administrative duties and make more cold calls.

What I learned from this experience is that the one commodity that you need the most of is time, of which there is limited supply. Therefore, you must always be asking yourself, what is the most valuable thing I can be doing with my time right now? I also learned that as a result of the do-not-call regulations and the FINRA regulations, you have to market yourself in several different ways to be successful. There is no one way to market yourself that is more productive that another. They all work a little bit. You have to talk to a lot of people to get 2 - 5 leads each day.

Managements approach is to keep the financial advisors from drifting outside of regulations. Otherwise they stay out of the way and allow people to do their jobs. They were eager to help, if asked.

The co-workers were friendly and helpful but always very busy.

The hardest part of the job was cold calling. It is by far the hardest thing I have done in my long sales career. Every financial advisor I have spoken with about cold calling has said that it is very hard, no fun, but absolutely necessary to building and maintaining your business.

The most enjoyable part of the job is meeting with prospects and clients, getting to know them personally, understanding their financial needs and what they dream of doing, building a financial plan to achieve their needs and dreams, and having them decide that they want you to advise them about their financial lives.

I started at this firm through a temp agency contract to hire straight out of school with a degree in Finance and Economics from the business school from Ohio State University. A call center atmosphere is not what I had originally had in mind right of school, but like me an other recent graduates who I met and also took the position was determine and enthusiastic to do our best hoping for greater opportunities down the road within the firm. Months later these buddies I met slowly ended leaving the firm for better positions with better firms. I soon realize that the firm was not a place where I wanted to continue my career, not only does the firm take months to offer you a position (anywhere from 6months to 2 years), but once offered the position it takes HR I kid you not months to follow up with the paper work to make the conversion process. I knew some one who was offered the postion in May and did not receive the paper until my last day in the month of August. I debated about taking the offer due the fact there is an 18 month rule where you can not move up just lateral within your department, again there were other factors such as no matter how well you do or where your stats are in relative to everyone it doesn't really matter unless certain management and hiring decision personnel like you. This place is really like capital hill it's all political and if your rhetoric skills are great and have mediocre stats or somewhat of understanding of your postion you go far. It strikes me odd that this postion has a bachelor/associate degree has a requirement but less than half of the employee there has one there even supervisor who don't have one, and really little to anyone here understands the financial market or financial jargons to assist Financial Advisor or clients with out it being explain to the representative or place on a really long hold. All I can say to sum this up is if you don't want to work at a place that feels like Game of Thrones, that has a large learning curve, appreciation of its employees, career advancement, and place that doesn't constantly remind you your a temp that can easily be replace then this is not your place. Many end up leaving to other firms like Citi, Huntington, and JP Morgan as my friends have. Again I decided not to take the awful position and left to look for better opportunities else where.

While the training manager who I have trained under was an awesome person, I honestly think that the actual floor support is lacking and I was stuck with a broken fob to hook my headset into which caused a lot of static and noise on the phone. I was blamed harshly over it. They didn't even seem to care one iota about that broken fob that you hook your headset into. Also, the computers and the virtual machine were painfully slow, and often they would crash. And even though, I was highly communicative with the management on this, they seemed to have a love of gaslighting me into oblivion over not being communicative at all.

I was given a golden promise from the training supervisor that trained me that I was wanted to become a regular official employee and was strung along to believe that I would be an excellent trainer for the job, all I had to do was to just show up, do my job, keep learning ways of doing my job better, get into the good practices. And just work on continuous improvement. And voila! I would become not only onboarded as an official employee of Morgan Stanley, but I would become a trainer right out of the gates.

Not even a full two weeks in of taking calls, I was called by the contracting company that I was working through, and they told me that while they admired and appreciated my commitment, I was not a good fit for their company at all. So, this is where I feel let down. My big thing is, that I had a lot of Doctor's appointments that I have made months/years in advanced. And I didn't want to be missing any of them. And I had to cancel, or just not show up to those appointments at all. I grossly neglected my self care and more or less, needed to not care about my health conditions what so ever, on their account. I even showed up to work extremely sick and really unable to work, but, I still showed up, and gave it my best. Heck, I even worked on my birthday.

However, even with all of that, I was still kicked to the curb something awful with again, the only explanation being: "We admire your commitment, but you're not a good fit!" and only that. They didn't want to go into the real reason as to why they decided to terminate my contract. And it's been quite hard trying to explain this to other perspective employers.

There are a lot of other things about this, but, I'm going to stop it right here before it gets insane long.

I work for a financial advisor that manages $1B in assets. A typical day consists of heavy phone coverage and responding to client requests, such as transferring securities between accounts, wiring funds, and sending checks. I prepare/complete client forms and work with the advisor and staff (two other advisors, a second CFP in addition to the primary advisor, and two CFAs) determining strategies for clients funds and situations. We take clients through a rigorous financial planning process that covers all areas of life, including insurance, annuities, long term care, lending, wills, estate planning, retirement planning, and philanthropic strategies. I open accounts, establish them on management (on our discretionary platform where we 100% manage the funds and with 3rd party money managers), prepare research and performance reports for client meetings, and countless other similar tasks.

I originally started with this company when it was Smith Barney. It was a nice place to work with a family environment. Since the merger with Morgan Stanley and subsequent conversion to the newly created platform from the legacy Smith Barney platform, the firm has been an incredibly difficult place to work. Without overly going into detail, the entire culture of the firm was destroyed and turned into an enormous, sterile atmosphere. You cannot compete simple tasks nor can you get help when you actually need it. It’s truly depressing to see people constantly leave for greener pastures (basically anywhere not named Morgan Stanley), and to have difficulty completing the simplest of tasks.

I’m a great associate, but after 5 years in my current role, I’m throwing in the towel with the firm. For a company that claims it’s completely for people growing and moving up, it’s interesting that not anyone actually can move up. I’ve been trying for over a year to switch departments because I am looking for a change, and the only people that fill the positions are people already in those departments, or new people to the firm. That was admitted to me first hand by my Human Resources representative. I can no longer work for a company that does not actually care about its employees, nor will it actually listen to them.

 Obtain CUSIP numbers for issues and ensure accurate setup in Products.
 Register issue with the Depository Trust Company (DTC).
 Submit Registration Letter to Trustee for proper issuance of bonds.
 Interact with Bankers, Trustees, Lawyers, and Issuer (CFO, CEO, etc.) on settlement procedures and logistics.
 Ensure that all trades are entered and issue is in balance before settlement date.
 Monitor Morgan Stanley Syndicate Operation’s P/L for accuracy.
 Obtain funding via banks and obtain wire instructions for payment to issuer.
 Developed procedural manual for the Registration and Trades Reconciliation area as well as for the Prospectus Procedure requirements.
 Created an Excel spreadsheet for the “recap sheets” which are sent to the Accounting Department and Settlement Department. The Recap sheet shows all of the allocations (retail, institutional customers, and MSDW designations) on an issue, including principal and interest so that the “cage” can pay the Accounting Department the correct issue proceeds.
 Developed an Excel spreadsheet for the Accounting Department (Balance Sheet). The Balance Sheet is used to calculate Issuer Payment, underwriter allocations and payments, expenses, issue P/L, and other essential deal information. The Balance Sheet is compared with the “recap sheet” to ensure the issue is in balance and proper payments and P/L are realized.
 Member of the Y2K Committee – Point person for all Syndicate Systems and performed testing to ensure Y2K compliance.
 Responsible for developing the Syndicate Business Continuity Plan in case of an emergency for Y2K. The plan is currently used in case of a natural disaster.
 Member of the Scorecard Committee – Developed the monthly Scorecard for distribution to Senior Management. The scorecard is a risk management tool used by Senior Management. Compiled monthly Scorecard report for distribution.
 Member of the IT Sub Committee – Liaison between IT and area personnel for deployment of new software and hardware. Communicated any problems with software/hardware to IT for resolution.
 Extensive knowledge of PC and Mainframe applications. Have a broad knowledge of the Microsoft Suite.
 Supervised and trained six staff members.

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