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Morgan Stanley is rolling out major changes to how it handles digital currencies, employee stock programs, and private company investments in 2026, with plans that company executives say work together as part of a single vision for the future of finance.
Jed Finn, who runs wealth management at Morgan Stanley, said the bank’s various moves are connected. “It all fits together in a broader strategy of adapting to the change in the industry and in some cases driving the change in the industry,” Finn told Barron’s Advisor.
The investment bank revealed last year it would team up with Zerohash, a company that builds cryptocurrency systems, to let people buy and sell Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana through E*Trade. Finn said that the feature should be ready to use in the first six months of this year. After that, Morgan Stanley plans to introduce its own digital wallet in the second six months of 2026. The bank sees this wallet as more than just a place to hold coins; it wants to eventually use it for trading all kinds of assets that exist in digital form.
“This is really a recognition that the way that financial service infrastructure works is going to change,” Finn said. He explained that as the bank builds out its systems, it will be able to mix traditional banking with newer forms of digital finance.
That could mean letting customers borrow money against their cryptocurrency to buy stocks, or the other way around. It might also involve making loans based on cryptocurrency that people keep in cold storage, which is a way to hold digital money offline for safety.
Morgan Stanley also expanded its relationship last year with Carta, a software company that helps private businesses track who owns their stock. The deal lets Morgan Stanley offer financial planning services to workers at those companies. This builds on an agreement from 2024 that made Morgan Stanley the only firm handling shares for companies getting ready to go public.
Capturing private company employees and founders
The Carta deal brings together two major players in managing company ownership records. For Morgan Stanley’s wealth division, it opens doors to founders, executives, and early investors who hold big stakes in young companies. These people often have questions about getting cash from their holdings, spreading out their investments, planning for retirement, and other money matters that Morgan Stanley can help with better than Carta can.
“What became clear is that if we could partner with Carta to deliver Morgan Stanley Wealth Management capabilities through the Carta platform to the individuals, we would be able to help everybody involved,” Finn said. He noted that many people involved with private companies have wealth on paper that has not yet turned into actual money. “But we’re in this for the long haul. We’re in this for 20, 30, 40 years—multiple generations.”
EquityZen deal opens door to pre-IPO investing
Morgan Stanley is also working to give more people access to private companies. A key part of this effort is buying EquityZen, a marketplace for trading private company shares. Morgan Stanley agreed to purchase EquityZen last year, and the deal should finish early in 2026.
Getting EquityZen will let Morgan Stanley’s regular wealth customers invest in private companies and grow its business with companies that want to sell more of their stock before going public.
“The average time to IPO 20 years ago was five years, and today it’s 14 years, and so all of our clients are missing out on that wealth creation,” Finn said. He explained the bank wanted to give customers access to opportunities usually limited to venture capital firms and large institutional investors.
Finn said Morgan Stanley picked EquityZen over other private share exchanges because it works directly with the companies issuing stock. Other exchanges use different types of contracts that can make company leaders lose track of who controls their shares, he said. “We didn’t want to be doing anything around the companies.”
The EquityZen purchase fits with the Carta partnership by strengthening Morgan Stanley’s ties to private companies with valuable stock. The bank wants to help arrange limited share sales for raising money and use its Carta connection to update ownership records.
Tokenization could reshape private share trading
Looking ahead, Finn sees the digital money systems Morgan Stanley is building eventually changing how private shares are sold. At first, sales on EquityZen will work the old-fashioned way. But later, private companies might turn portions of their stock into digital tokens to make trades between buyers and sellers easier.
“One huge benefit is transaction efficiency for the company,” he said. “Once there’s a digital representation of that share of value for the private-market company, it can trade seamlessly and no one has to sign anything and it becomes an instantaneous settlement.”
The move comes as real-world asset tokenization continues to gain traction across the financial industry, with experts predicting the market could reach trillions of dollars in the coming years.
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