 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined now by Anjali Menon. She is the VP of Technology at Morgan Stanley. Thanks so much for coming on the show. My pleasure to be here. So I'd love to just tell our viewers a little bit about your journey as a woman in technology who now works at an investment bank. Yes, absolutely. I think it's a very long journey, if you will. It started when I was seven years old. Back in my school, we had an extracurricular computer science course. So I signed up for it and I remember starting out as someone who was coding in basic. And it was just very simple things. You draw a line, draw a kite, watch it move across the screen. It was just so exciting for someone at that age. So I kept at it. I continued to enroll in the same course over the years, so middle school, high school. And then I did my undergraduate in computer science and engineering. And then in 2011, I graduated from NYU with a master's in computer science. And Morgan Stanley was one of those companies that it showed up during on-campus recruitment. And just the feedback that I had heard from my other peers who were already in the company, about the work culture of Morgan Stanley. It was just really, really good. So I joined Morgan Stanley and right now I'm a systems owner. I own the equities and options order entry application. So I'm responsible for the overall design and development. So it's been a really exciting journey to Morgan Stanley, yep. So you as a woman in technology and now working in finance, I mean these are two very male dominated industries that are come together to provide your job. So what is it like to be a woman on the front lines? So it's interesting. I feel like a lot of people have misconceptions about that, about being a woman in tech, right? But we have a very diverse and inclusive culture of Morgan Stanley. Like I mentioned, I am a systems owner for the equities and options order entry application. So when I'm sitting at a table with senior managers, because I'm the subject matter expertise expert, it's great to look at them, sit and listen to me talk because I'm the one who's bringing in the information. So it doesn't really matter if you're a woman or a man, what matters is are you the one with the expertise? Are you the one with the talent, right? And they're going to sit up and listen to you irrespective of your gender. So that's just the culture of Morgan Stanley. So yeah. So now talking about the culture and you are here obviously trying to recruit right young talent at the Grace Hopper Conference. What are you hearing from potential employees? What are they looking for in a company? What are we looking for in students? Well, I'm interested in both what Morgan Stanley wants to see at a prospective candidates, but also what you're hearing from the recruits themselves in terms of how they want their job to fit into their lives. Absolutely. A lot of, what are the recurring questions that I do get when I'm interviewing students is, how do you maintain the whole work life balance? Like you said, finance and tech, it's a very grueling industry, right? So how do you keep that balance? And what's really wonderful is that you don't have to sacrifice your personal life or your passion projects for your work. Me personally, for the last year, I've been taking a lot of extracurricular courses, non-critic courses at NYU in filmmaking and photography because that's just my passion project. I love telling stories and I used to be a writer and I was just looking to explore other mediums and telling stories. So in the last year, since the summer of 2016, I've been taking courses at NYU and it's just been such a great experience then. And it's just that, I think Morgan Stanley sort of allows you to have that culture, right? You have your 95 job, right? And during those hours, you're very focused on what you're doing, but they do give you time outside of that to just work on your passion projects. And it's great that I can find that balance between the two. So Morgan Stanley could be a choice employer for a young woman looking for... Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And now, what are you looking for in a potential recruit? What are you telling the young women here at Grace Hopper? We are looking for women who are bright and very confident. I feel like all of the interviews that I've done in the last few days, I've met such wonderful young women and it's really difficult to choose because everyone has their own area of expertise and you can tell they're very, very intelligent. They love challenges, right? A lot of the questions that I ask are typically around problem solving and puzzles and it's great to see how they can approach it and deconstruct it. So it's been really difficult trying to find, it's been really difficult trying to choose one over the other because everyone's just so equally bright, yeah. So how are you going about this recruitment process? What are, how are you assembling a diverse team? So we've been doing a lot of on-the-spot quizzes. So like once a day we have two problems that are presented. We have students stopping by and they're working it out. We're helping them through the process of figuring out the solution. And anyone who stands out, we're pulling them aside, scheduling interviews with them. We're actually also making offers on the spot as well. So that's been a new experience. So yeah, it's been good. We have a lot of interviews already scheduled as well. So yeah. So in terms of your job, what are the things you're most excited about that you're working on? In terms of the real technical challenges that you're facing. Absolutely. So I work within the capital market space and wealth management. Alex lines up financial advisors, right? So my job when I came in three or four years ago was I wanted to enhance the order entry experience for the equities and options product. And essentially what we were looking to do was enable the FAs with a tool that would enable them to do their jobs efficiently and quickly. So the last couple of years we've been building an equities trading platform that would enable them to do just that. And it's just really exciting to see what the legacy system did and what the new system does and the progress that we've made. And we just hear really good feedback from the field as well like our clients, the FAs, the financial advisors who are using the new system, it's great to hear things like, oh, I love that I can do my job so quickly. It's just like one or two clicks and I can do so much more than the legacy system. So it's really exciting. So what is the difference there? I mean, what are you enabling to happen so much more speedily than happened with the legacy system? So our legacy system was a single order entry application why the new system allows them to submit multiple orders across securities, across accounts in a single operation. So what would have taken the minutes to submit say 10 orders now just takes a few seconds. So it's just a faster enhanced order entry experience. And I love that I was part of that journey. So speed is one thing. What are some other priorities that you have going forward in terms of enhancing the products that you provide to financial advisors? Just be able to efficiently submit orders as well. So with respect to just submitting multiple orders, going across securities or even quickly creating tickets with the legacy system, it was a lot of form filling. You start, you enter the account, you enter the security and you fill out all of the other details. But we've enabled them with quick ways to create tickets. So in just a few key strokes with semantic based entries, they can create multiple tickets and submit the order. So just being able to efficiently do their job as well was one of the key things that we were looking to deliver. And are you focused at all on the design, user experience element too? So we do have a dedicated user experience team, but since I started off as a front-end developer, I did work very closely with them to help build out that interface. So yeah, what we do have a dedicated team was great to actually work with them to help build that out. Great. And finally, I'm just curious about your thoughts about this Grace Hopper Conference. This is, is this your first time? It's my first time at Grace Hopper. And you're here. It's been overwhelming. I remember walking in yesterday and I could see a sea of people and it's been wonderful. Yeah. Great, great. So we'll see you here next year. Absolutely. Excellent. Great. Well Anjali, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you and having you on the show. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference in just a little bit.