Finance

Morgan Stanley rolls out OpenAI-powered chatbot for Wall Street division

Published

6 months ago

October 23, 2024

A screen displays the trading information for Morgan Stanley on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), January 19, 2022.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Morgan Stanley is expanding the use of OpenAI-powered, generative artificial intelligence tools to its vaunted investment banking and trading division, CNBC has learned.

The firm, which first rolled out an AI assistant based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to its wealth management advisors in early 2023, began rolling out another version called AskResearchGPT this summer in its institutional securities group, according to Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley’s global director of research.

The tool lets users extract answers from across the universe of Morgan Stanley’s research — including on stocks, commodities, industry trends and regions — collapsing what could otherwise be the cumbersome task of gleaning insights from the over 70,000 reports produced annually by the bank.

“We see it as a game changer from a productivity standpoint, both for our research analysts and our colleagues across institutional securities,” Huberty said in an interview. The tool helps staff “access the highest quality, most insightful information as efficiently as possible.”

Since its arrival as a viral consumer app in late 2022, OpenAI’s generative AI technology has been swiftly adopted by Wall Street’s largest players.

Morgan Stanley says that close to half of its 80,000 employees are using generative AI tools created with OpenAI, while at rival JPMorgan Chase, about 60% of the firm’s 316,043 employees have access to a platform using OpenAI’s models, said a person with knowledge of the matter. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised money at a $157 billion valuation.

OpenAI already has network advantages in financial services because of its ample funding and early focus on use cases for banks, said Pierre Buhler, a banking consultant with SSA & Co.

“They are ahead of everyone else in terms of market penetration,” Buhler said.”But it is an emerging market, and we are still at the very beginning.” It’s likely that competitors to OpenAI such as Anthropic will gain use over time, he added.

Viral hit

At Morgan Stanley, a leader in global investment banking and trading along with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, employees have gravitated toward AskResearchGPT, using it instead of getting on the phone or lobbing an email to the research department, Huberty said.

Employees are asking the tool three times the number of questions as compared to a previous tool based on traditional AI that’s been in use since 2017, according to the bank.

It’s most in-demand among salespeople and other client-facing staff who often field questions from hedge funds or other institutional investors, said Huberty.

“We found that it takes a salesperson one-tenth of the time to respond to the average client inquiry” using AskResearchGPT, she said.

Productivity boost

In a recent demonstration, the GPT-4 based chatbot was able to summarize Morgan Stanley’s position on matters from copper to Nvidia to the finer points of standing up a data center, understanding industry-specific jargon and providing charts and links to source material.

The bank wants to push adoption further in light of the productivity gains it’s seeing, Huberty said. The tool is embedded within workers’ browsers as well as Microsoft Teams and Outlook programs to make it readily available.

Understandably, Huberty says she is often asked if AI could ultimately replace the analysts who are creating the reams of research published under Morgan Stanley’s banner.

“I don’t see in the near future a path to just having the machine write the research report to generate the idea,” she said. “I really think that it’s humans who make the call and own the relationship, which is a really important part of the analyst job, or sales and trading job, or corporate banker job.”

Finance

Pennylane doubles valuation as Alphabet VC fund takes stake

Published

2 hours ago

April 7, 2025

Business Finance News

Seksan Mongkhonkhamsao | Moment | Getty Images

French accounting software firm Pennylane has doubled its valuation to 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion) in a new 75 million euro funding round.

Pennylane told CNBC that it raised the fresh funds from a host of venture funds, with Sequoia Capital leading the round and Alphabet’s CapitalG, Meritech and DST Global also participating.

Founded in 2020, Pennylane sells what it calls an “all-in-one” accounting platform that’s used by accountants and other financial professionals.

The platform is primarily targeted toward small to medium-sized firms, offering tools for functions spanning expensing, invoicing, cash flow management and financial forecasting.

“We came in tailoring a product that looks a bit like [Intuit’s] QuickBooks or Xero but adapting it to the needs of continental accountants, starting with France,” Pennylane’s CEO and co-founder Arthur Waller told CNBC.

Pennylane currently serves around 4,500 accounting firms and more than 350,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. The startup was previously valued at 1 billion euros in a 2024 investment round.

European expansion

For now, Pennylane only operates in France. However, after the new fundraise, the startup now plans to expand its services across Europe — starting with Germany in the summer.

“It’s going to be a lot of work. It took us approximately five years to have a product mature in France,” Waller said, adding that he hopes to reach product maturity in Germany in a shorter time period of two years.

Pennylane plans to end the year on about 100 million euros of annual recurring revenue — a measure of annual revenue generated from subscriptions that renew each year.

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“We are going to get breakeven by end of the year,” Waller said, adding that Pennylane runs on lower customer acquisition costs than other fintechs. “75% of our costs are R&D [research and development],” he added.

Pennylane also plans to boost hiring after the new funding round. It is looking to grow to 800 employees by the end of 2025, up from 550 currently.

‘Co-pilot’ for accountants

Like many other fintechs, Pennylane is embracing artificial intelligence. Waller said the startup is using the technology to help clients automate bookkeeping and free up time for other things like advisory services.

“Because we have a modern tech stack, we’re able to embed all kinds of AI, but also GenAI, into the product,” Waller told CNBC. “We’re really trying to build a ‘co-pilot’ for the accountant.”

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He added that new electronic invoicing regulations coming into force across Europe are pushing more and more firms to consider new digital products to serve their accounting needs.

“Every business in France within a year from now will have to chose a product operator to issue and receive invoices,” Waller said, calling e-invoicing a “huge market.”

Luciana Lixandru, a partner at Sequoia who sits on the board of Pennylane, said the reforms represent a “massive market opportunity” as the accounting industry is still catching up in terms of digitization.

“The reality is the market is very fragmented,” Lixandru told CNBC via email. “In each country there are one or two decades-old incumbents, and few options that serve both SMBs and their accountants.”

Finance

Bitcoin drops Sunday evening as cryptocurrencies join global market rout

Published

9 hours ago

April 6, 2025

Business Finance News

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Bitcoin fell below the $79,000 level as investors braced for more financial market volatility after U.S. equites suffered their worst decline since 2020 on the rollout of President Donald Trump’s restrictive global tariffs.

The price of bitcoin was last lower by 4% at $78,835.07, according to Coin Metrics, after trading above the $80,000 for most of this year — barring a couple brief blips below it amid recent volatility. It’s off its January all-time high by about 34%.

Although the flagship cryptocurrency usually trades like a big tech stock and is often viewed by traders as a leading indicator of market sentiment, it bucked the broader market meltdown last week – holding in the $80,000 to $90,000 range and rising to end the week as stocks tumbled and even gold fell.

Other cryptocurrencies suffered bigger losses overnight. Ether and the token tied to Solana tumbled 9% each.

Bitcoin’s down move triggered a wave of long liquidations, as traders betting on an increase in its price were forced to sell their assets to cover their losses. In the past 24 hours, bitcoin has seen more than $181 million in long liquidations, according to CoinGlass. Ether saw $188 million in long liquidations in the same period.

Bitcoin has traded mostly above $80,000 in 2025

Rattled investors dumped their holdings of cryptocurrencies, which trade 24 hours, over the weekend as they anticipated further carnage, after Trump’s retaliatory tariffs raised global recession fears and caused investors to sell all risk.

The duties on all imports, in addition to custom tariffs for major trading partners, have sparked worries of a global trade war that could lead the U.S. into a recession. Growing concerns about the far-reaching impact of the tariffs sent markets reeling worldwide.

In the two sessions following the tariff announcement, global stocks wiped out $7.46 trillion in market value based on the market cap of the S&P Global Broad Market Index, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

That figure includes $5.87 trillion lost in the U.S. stock market over those two sessions and another $1.59 trillion loss in market value in other major global markets.

Bitcoin is down 15% in 2025 and, absent a crypto-specific catalyst, is expected to continue moving in tandem with equities as global recession fears overshadow any regulatory tailwinds crypto was expected to benefit from this year.