Morgan Stanley Pursuing Fixes for Wealthy Clients Hurt in Outage

(Bloomberg) -- Morgan Stanley says it’s working on providing remedies for any clients stung by a technology problem in its wealth-management business, which lasted about four hours Wednesday.

The issue wasn’t related to trading-volume issues or the fact that about 90% of the bank’s staff is working from home amid the coronavirus outbreak, according to a Morgan Stanley spokesperson. Rather, the problem was from a bug related to an external software provider.

Morgan Stanley, with $2.7 trillion under assets, joins JPMorgan Chase & Co. in experiencing technology hiccups during a tumultuous time in markets. JPMorgan’s issues at its wealth-management unit two weeks ago were volume-related, and the company had a separate problem in its institutional stock-trading platform the same day.

At Morgan Stanley, it’s unclear how many clients were affected. Customers were still able to trade through a backup system or with an adviser, the spokesperson said, and the issue has since been resolved.

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