'Every important decision maker is flown out there': Morgan Stanley is raiding Silicon Valley for the best tech ideas of 2018

• Morgan Stanley's Silicon Valley tech summit is underway.
• The firm has sent a legion of decision makers to the West Coast to find the next best tech companies to partner with.
• It's meeting with over 150 technology providers in Palo Alto, California this week.

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When most big banks seek out vendors to help them rejuvenate their tech infrastructure, they set up calls and get meetings on the calendar. But Morgan Stanley, in a sign of the growing importance of partnering with the right tech firms, jets off a fleet of its key decision makers to Silicon Valley.

The New York-based bank has boots on the ground this week to meet with over 150 technology providers as part of its annual CTO Innovation Summit in Palo Alto, California.

The event solves a common pain point that both tech entrepreneurs and large firms face: they can't find each other.

"I have been in the shoes of the entrepreneur," Shawn Melamed, Morgan Stanley's head of technology business development, told Business Insider in an interview. "You can waste years trying to sell to the people who are not the right buyer."

"Every important decision maker is flown out there, division by division," he added. "When you present to our company, you know the right people are in front of you."

Big technology execs at Morgan Stanley attending the conference include the bank's head of technology Rob Rooney; head of wealth management technology Sal Cucchiara; head of institutional securities technology & International Steve Mavin; head of enterprise technology & risk Michael Poser; and head of corporate and funding technology Bobby Gilja.

The event highlights the firm's focus on collaborative innovation, Melamed said. It connects executives who span the bank's business lines with startups working on projects that could somehow improve life for Morgan Stanley employees or clients, translate into a new business, or reduce costs. The startups involved in the event are nominated by venture capital investors and include tech focus areas like machine learning, artificial intelligence, data and analytics, and cybersecurity.

Companies at the summit include machine learning firms Optimizing Mind and Wave Computing, big data company SQream, and messaging technology company Smooch.

After Morgan Stanley meets with a startup, it then decides if it wants to spend more time with the company based on the maturity of its product offerings, team, and other factors.

To be sure, not all the firms are in financial services. Qualtrics, which provides technology services relating to surveys, is a company used by Morgan Stanley's wealth division. The bank first met the firm through its summit.

"We went through a journey with them," Melamed said. "At first, there was very small deployment and then it exploded to all of our wealth-management clients. And now all of our employees."

Delphix, a data center security provider, and Illumio, a data company, are also being recognized at this year's summit.

Wall Street banks have long realized they can't go it alone and need to rely on outside firms to power them. In fact, banks have begun to rely even more heavily on third-party vendors, according to a recent report by Broadridge, the financial technology provider.

"Given the imperative to cut costs and the opportunities offered by new technologies, many institutions are now actively seeking to embrace partners," the report said. "They are leveraging partnerships to add innovation in areas where they lack expertise or scale, or to enable them to focus the expertise they do have on their most differentiating areas."

Morgan Stanley's CTO Summit, which the bank has run for 18 years, has planted the seeds for big projects.

Cloudera, which was honored by the bank in 2017, played a critical role in the development of a platform used within the bank's wealth management division. Today, data from the platform is being used to glean to send-out personalized emails to clients when the markets go berserk.

Morgan Stanley has been putting a greater focus on technology. Rob Rooney, who previously oversaw the bank's operations in Europe, Middle East, Africa, as well as its efforts in tech, was transitioned to New York to oversee technology exclusively.

The bank is also investing heavily in digital within its wealth management business. It launched a robo advisor in late 2017, primarily geared at children of its existing clients.