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The center employs around 3,000 people and supporting functions ranging from trading technology and risk analysis to generative AI.
The Budapest office, launched in 2006 with a few dozen mathematicians, now supports Morgan Stanley’s operations across Europe, North America and Asia. Nearly half of its employees work in technology, while sizable teams also operate in finance, risk analysis and quantitative modeling.
Several functions now carry global responsibility from Budapest. To mark the anniversary, Morgan Stanley recognized local teams whose work has had the greatest impact on the firm’s international operations.
Among the awarded teams is the group responsible for building the bank’s yield curves, which are used to calculate the present value of future payments. These calculations underpin the pricing of bonds, loans and complex trading products, as well as risk measurement.
Morgan Stanley’s global trading pricing software is also developed in Budapest.
Another Budapest-based development team, active since 2007, works on delivering market data from exchanges around the world to the bank’s systems as quickly as possible.
At peak times, the system processes data from 65 million-70 million transactions per day. According to the company, the information reaches users in less than one ten-thousandth of a second after arriving in the system.
The Budapest office has also played a central role in developing AI tools for Morgan Stanley’s wealth management business.
A local team oversees the operation of an internal knowledge base spanning more than 16,000 pages and helps determine the development direction of new functions, many of them AI-based. The system feeds an internal assistant used by financial advisers.
Morgan Stanley said 95% of the answers to the approximately 3 million questions submitted to the assistant so far have been drawn from this knowledge base.
The Budapest team also developed the wealth management division’s first generative AI application, which is now used by tens of thousands of employees from the United States to Asia.
“The 20-year history of Morgan Stanley’s Budapest office is a story of expertise and ambition. Mathematicians, engineers, economists and other professionals graduating from Hungarian universities or attracted here from other countries have proved over two decades that they can perform at the forefront of even the most complex tasks in international finance,” said Dániel Mayer, head of Morgan Stanley’s Budapest office.
“Today, colleagues working here are responsible for developing and operating global systems and for professional decisions at the international level, and we are very proud of that,” he added.
The anniversary awards also highlighted the growth of individual functions within the Budapest office.
The controlling team responsible for financial accounting related to the bank’s internal operations began with five people in 2006. It now has more than 65 employees and manages a global function from Budapest with full international decision-making authority.
The model risk management team, meanwhile, led a six-year program reviewing around 3,000 mathematical models used by the bank to measure risk and calculate prices. The project aimed to bring the models to a uniform standard in line with the expectations of international regulators and was coordinated globally from Budapest.
Morgan Stanley has also worked closely with Hungarian higher education over the past two decades. A significant share of employees at the Budapest office graduated from leading Hungarian universities.
Through the company’s internship programs, dozens of students begin their careers at the bank each year, with many former interns now working in management positions.
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