Financial Crimes Risk: Quality Oversight UAT Coordinator (AVP)

Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm that conducts its business through three principal business segments—Institutional Securities, Wealth Management (WM), and Asset Management. Morgan Stanley provides comprehensive financial advice and services to its clients including brokerage, investment advisory, financial and wealth planning, credit and lending, deposits and cash management, annuities, insurance, retirement, and trust services.

As a market leader, the talent and passion of our people is critical to our success. Together, we share a common set of values rooted in doing the right thing, putting clients first, leading with exceptional ideas and a commitment to diversity and inclusion. Morgan Stanley can provide a superior foundation for building a professional career - a place for people to learn, achieve, and grow.

Department Profile:

The WM First Line Financial Crimes Risk (“1L FCR”) department is embedded within the Firm’s business line and is responsible for identifying, assessing, and escalating potential money laundering and reputational risk issues associated with higher risk client types. The 1L FCR department is considered the first line of defense and supports the onboarding, screening, due diligence, and enhanced due diligence processes for Morgan Stanley.

Team: Technology Strategy and Solutions – Quality Oversight UAT Coordinator

Technology Strategy and Solutions(“TSS”) is the internal team responsible for enabling and delivering technology solutions for the 1L FCR department. TSS partners with internal 1L FCR teams, Platforms, Technology and Operations to design, build, enhance, and support the systems that enable AML, KYC, screening, onboarding, and other client-risk processes within the first line of defense.

TSS delivers end-to-end technology solutions for 1L FCR, including requirements writing, functional design, UAT, and production/post-production support. These roles strengthen TSS’ ability to deliver stable releases and ensure reliable system performance across 1L FCR-owned capabilities.

The Quality Oversight function provides highest standards of user acceptance testing before go-live and structured triage, investigation, requirement refinement, and coordination for all issues raised before and after deployment. The team also performs post-deployment testing and ongoing production validation to ensure that system functionality remains stable and unchanged after releases. The group reports to a U.S.-based VP and partners closely with 1L FCR, Platforms, and Technology to ensure efficient issue resolution, high-quality releases, and continuous improvement across all first-line Financial Crimes-related systems.

This role is well suited for analytical professionals who are looking to deepen their experience in Financial Crimes technology and production environments.

Primary Responsibilities:

UAT planning & test design

• Analyze business requirements and functional documentation to develop comprehensive UAT test plans, scenarios, and scripts aligned to business outcomes.
• Translate requirements into clear, executable test cases with defined acceptance criteria, expected results, and traceability to scope.
• Participate in requirement walkthroughs to document scenarios, identify gaps, ambiguities, and dependencies early.

UAT coordination & execution

• Serve as the day-to-day UAT point of contact for assigned initiatives.
• Develop UAT plans, test scenarios, and scripts; execute testing and log defects in Jira (including severity, steps to reproduce, evidence, and impacted functionality).
• Coordinate test environments, test data, and user access, partnering with Technology and platform teams to ensure readiness prior to execution.
• Organize and facilitate UAT kickoffs, daily checkpoints, defect triage sessions, and retest cycles.

Defect management & triage

• Track, triage, and manage defects through resolution and retesting, ensuring appropriate prioritization and clear ownership.
• Support root-cause discussions by comparing observed behavior to requirements, designs, and upstream test results; ensure defects vs. change requests are correctly categorized.
• Validate fixes through retesting and regression testing as required, confirming issues are resolved without introducing new defects.

Stakeholder management & communication

• Provide clear status updates to project teams and stakeholders, including progress against plan, defect trends, risks, and mitigation actions.
• Escalate critical risks (environment instability, data issues, high-severity defects) in a timely manner with recommended next steps.

Reporting & closure

• Prepare test summary reports including executed test cases, pass/fail rates, defect metrics, outstanding risks, and go/no-go recommendations.
• Monitor testing activity against project timelines, highlighting schedule impacts and driving actions to maintain delivery commitments.
• Support UAT sign-off, ensuring evidence is recorded, key decisions are documented, and audit-ready artifacts are stored per process.

Process improvement

• Maintain and continuously improve UAT templates, checklists, and playbooks to increase consistency and quality.
• Identify recurring defect patterns and recommend changes to requirements clarity, test coverage, data setup, training, or upstream QA processes.

• Maintain strong documentation and follow established processes to ensure consistency, accuracy, and control adherence
• Assist with post-deployment validation and confirm that changes and fixes performed by Technology operate as intended

Qualifications

• 5+ years of related experience in UAT roles, technology QA, business analysis, operations, production support, or similar roles.
• Bachelor’s degree in Data Analytics, Computer Science, Finance, Business or a related field
• Familiarity with test management tools (e.g. Jira/ Xray/Zephyr) and structured test reporting/metrics.
• Demonstrated ability to perform structured analysis of system behavior, workflow logic, and data.
• Experience coordinating test data creation, environment readiness, and access controls in governed environments.
• Strong written communication skills with the ability to draft and refine high-quality test scenarios, test cases and business requirements.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to drive outcomes across cross-functional teams.
• Proven ability to work independently in a fast-paced, high-volume environment while managing multiple priorities
• Strong organizational skills, attention to detail, and commitment to producing accurate, high-quality work products.
• Exposure to production readiness/go-live activities and post-release validation.
• Ability to handle confidential information with professionalism and discretion.
• Knowledge of Financial Crimes concepts (AML, KYC, CIP, screening, onboarding, periodic review) is helpful but not required; must be able to learn quickly.

Skills and Qualities:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a methodical, structured approach
• Clear concise communication (written and verbal) with the ability to translate issues into actional next steps
• High integrity, ownership mindset, and strong work ethic
• Ability to escalate risks or blockers promptly with clear supporting detail
• Ability to collaborate effectively with colleagues in both the U.S. and India
• Proactive, resourceful, and comfortable working through ambiguity
• Ability to manage competing priorities under tight deadlines
• Detail-oriented with strong documentation discipline
• Interest in growing into broader responsibilities within TSS and 1L FCR
• Working knowledge of MS Office (e.g. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM MORGAN STANLEY:

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients – helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that’s differentiated – and we’ve done that for 90 years. Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren’t just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries. At Morgan Stanley, you’ll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work-life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There’s also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.

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For NY:

Expected base pay rates for the role will be between $105K-$140K per year at the commencement of employment. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, incentive compensation, discretionary bonuses, other short and long-term incentive packages, and other Morgan Stanley sponsored benefit programs.

Morgan Stanley's goal is to build and maintain a workforce that is diverse in experience and background but uniform in reflecting our standards of integrity and excellence. Consequently, our recruiting efforts reflect our desire to attract and retain the best and brightest from all talent pools. We want to be the first choice for prospective employees.

It is the policy of the Firm to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, sex stereotype, gender, gender identity or expression, transgender, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, disability, marital and civil partnership/union status, pregnancy, veteran or military service status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Morgan Stanley is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversifying its workforce (M/F/Disability/Vet).