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Though Morgan Stanley’s Innovation Lab sits firmly in Manhattan’s Financial District, I hardly saw any of the finance bros who dot the streets outside during my recent tour.

I didn’t know quite what to expect ahead of my visit — robots analyzing market moves? intricate gadgets? — and Megan Brewer, the head of firmwide market innovation and labs, tempered my wildest expectations when she described the space as “effectively a very large data center.” The lab, she said, gives people “all the infrastructure that is needed to test ideas in a secure, scalable fashion.”

Morgan Stanley employees who want to experiment with their own ideas or test third-party products that might help the firm can use the Innovation Lab. Brewer told me that most of the people who use the space are technologists, but that everyone at the bank has access.

“Most people don’t think of banks as where people are sitting there soldering and working on custom design trips,” she said. “But we offer that as well.”

Morgan Stanley is sure to celebrate innovators

And it became clear to me that Brewer’s team is pulling multiple levers to attract and retain the firm’s technologists. She helps run the bank’s Patent Accelerator Program, which guides innovators through the patent process. When someone’s invention earns a patent, Brewer’s team sends a message to their manager. They post on internal sites, frame the physical patent, and note the accomplishment on the person’s company profile. Morgan Stanley has even put patent-holders’ faces on their digital ads in Times Square, Brewer said.

Patents don’t only grant legal control over an invention, but also acknowledge something as a creative, genuinely new idea. Inventions have to be “non-obvious” to get a patent, and they’re a quantitative way for banks to flex their technological chops.

Banks are generally racing to embrace the newest technology. A McKinsey report from late 2024 found that banks have massively increased their tech spending in recent years, and are especially focused on hiring people to produce products in-house.

While tech companies are cutting back on new-hire offers, my time at Morgan Stanley made it clear that banks might be keen on snapping up some of the available talent. Citi also has a network of physical innovation labs across the world, and many banks have accelerator or innovation programs.

When we were ready to enter the lab, Brewer told me I might need to leave my notebook behind, since it’s flammable. The first room, though, seemed pretty innocuous: a bunch of computers with black screens, and a lone guy sitting at a desktop. I almost felt like I was in a “Black Mirror” episode, the rows of blank monitors a dystopian end-of-world tableau.

The lab was full of high-end, deceptively plain machines

As we kept moving through the lab, the image of a stereotypical bank continued to fade. It was hot and loud inside the data center, with a white noise of whirring machines and fluorescent lighting. Brewer advised me to stand on a vent if I got too hot amid the rows of equipment.

Most of the time, I didn’t know what I was looking at — at one point, it turned out to be the lab’s first GPU. I asked how much it was all was worth, and everyone laughed, saying I didn’t want to know.

“Many millions,” Brewer said, adding that some pieces cost as much as rent on a New York City apartment. (I became very conscious of not stepping on the many blue wires grazing the floor in my kitten heels.)

Huge investment aside, though, some parts of the lab seemed almost scrappy, evidence of exploration and technology that’s still in the works. There were labels made of blue tape and Sharpie, stickers that looked like they came from a name-tag machine, flame-retardant Post-Its.

At the end of the tour, I met an electrical engineer, who was standing in front of a clearly very complex, very impressive machine he’d made. My tour guide told me that he’d already built and patented multiple versions of the chip machine sitting before us, which he was too polite to mention himself.

He carefully explained his project — Morgan Stanley asked that don’t get into specifics here — and indulged my many questions, talking to me in what were likely excruciatingly simple terms. When I asked whether he ever expected to work at a bank, I got an emphatic no and some knowing head-nods from those leading my tour.

Morgan Stanley has around 23,000 tech employees, 15,000 of whom are developers. At the time of this writing, the bank had 249 full-time technology jobs listed on its site.

The lines between banking and Big Tech

I didn’t talk to, or maybe even see, a single banker the whole time I was there, which makes some sense given that Morgan Stanley’s main New York headquarters are in Midtown and I was at a smaller office downtown. People talked in the terms of a startup, pushing themes like innovation that may appeal to an engineer more than the average investment banker.

We eventually left the lab and emerged into a similarly harshly lit hallway, the walls lined with cardboard boxes, before passing through a door and into the shinier, more central office area. I stepped into the bathroom before leaving; it was designed in the crisp image of the finance aesthetic, with a few cubbies holding hair straighteners.

Looking around, I remembered where I was: a bank at the tip of Manhattan, not a tech company in California. I wondered, though, how the lines between the two will continue to blur — and how much they’ve blurred already.

Nationwide is under fire for refusing to give members a binding vote on a controversial 43% pay rise for its chief executive, Debbie Crosbie, which could total up to £7m.

Campaigners say it leaves the mutual’s members with fewer rights than shareholders of listed UK banks and exposes a worrying “loophole” in building society rules.

Nationwide argues that after its £2.9bn takeover of Virgin Money Crobie’s pay should compete with that offered by banks such as Lloyds and NatWest. However, the board is only offering members an “advisory” vote at its annual general meeting (AGM) on 25 July, meaning there are no repercussions if they reject it.

Large high street banks are required to hold a binding vote on their pay policies at least once every three years, under laws governing large businesses listed on the London Stock Exchange. If shareholders reject the policy, they have to revert to the old pay plan and put a revised pay deal to shareholders within 12 months.

Nationwide could do the same, but said it is already going further than required under the Building Societies Act, which only requires binding votes for the election of board members.

“As part of our commitment to member engagement and transparency, Nationwide voluntarily puts the remuneration policy to the membership on an advisory basis at the AGM and we currently have no plans to change this approach,” a spokesperson said.

While Nationwide has never held a binding vote on pay, it has also never proposed such a large renumeration package for its chief executive, which could result in a record payout worth up to £7m from current levels of £4.8m. That is close behind NatWest Group, which in April secured backing for a package worth up to £7.7m for chief executive Paul Thwaite.

Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, described the situation as a “loophole in the governance of building societies”.

“Mutuals are supposed to have a more collective approach to business than corporate banks, but while the banks are required to revise pay policies that are rejected by a majority of shareholders, and provide a response to the stock market if more than 20% vote against, building societies can in theory ignore their members.”

“The Nationwide case, where there may be significant discomfort with the huge pay out planned for the chief executive, highlights the need for the loophole to be closed,” he said.

Crosbie’s £7m pay deal has angered some members. “I’m a Nationwide customer and didn’t know about this? Please send me a voting form immediately,” one posted on X. “Building societies are supposed to be the good guys. The apple has fallen far from the tree,” another claimed.

Sara Hall, the co-executive director at campaign group Positive Money said Nationwide “hiking its chief executive’s pay because that’s what the big banks are doing would be completely at odds with what building societies are supposed to stand for”.

The move is “counterintuitive for an institution whose main selling point is putting its customers before shareholders”, Hall added.

A Nationwide spokesperson pushed back against the criticism, saying its pay proposals – although advisory – “always received overwhelming member support”.

“Any suggestion that we would ever ignore a vote against it is simply ridiculous. We always consider their views and at the last AGM over 94% of votes were in favour of the proposed remuneration policy,” they said.

“Nationwide delivered record member value last year, we are still first for customer satisfaction among high street banks, and more people switched their current accounts to Nationwide than to any other brand.

“We have managed this because we can attract, retain and motivate talented leaders. Even after the changes that are being proposed at the AGM, Nationwide’s chief executive will still be paid substantially less than the other large banks.”

Are you happy? Do you sleep well? Do you have many friends? Are you a workaholic?

Those are some of the questions Katelin Eagan, 27, said she had to answer recently when she was applying for a job.

She agreed to take a cognitive and personality assessment as part of the hiring process, but was a bit bewildered. Many of the questions had nothing to do with the engineering position, which, after completing the tests and going through several months of silence, she was eventually rejected for.

Eagan says she’s been applying for jobs full-time since the start of the year. Her efforts haven’t panned out yet, which she attributes partly to how competitive her field has become and employers having room to be picky.

“I think there’s definitely a lower amount than I thought there would be,” she said of available roles.

But that may be only part of the story. Employers are growing increasingly selective, partly because many are seeing a flood of seemingly perfect candidates, many of whom are suspected of using AI to finesse their applications, according to recruiters and hiring assessment providers who spoke to BI.

The solution many companies have come to?

Make everyone take a test — and see who candidates really are, irrespective of what ChatGPT suggested they put on their résumés.

According to surveys conducted by TestGorilla, one firm that administers talent assessments for employers, 76% of companies that had hired in the 12 months leading up to April said they were using skills tests to determine if a candidate was a right fit, up from 55% who said they were using role-specific skills tests in 2022.

Employers seem most interested in testing for soft skills — amorphous qualities like communicativeness and leadership — as well as administering general aptitude and personality tests, Wouter Durville, the CEO of TestGorilla, told Business Insider.

TestGorilla’s Critical Thinking test was completed more than 100,000 times in the first quarter of this year, a 61% increase compared to the same quarter in 2024.

The firm also offers a Big 5 personality assessment, which was completed more than 127,000 times in the first quarter — a 69% increase compared to last year.

Demand among US employers in particular has been “massive,” Durville said, adding that many firms have turned to tests as a result of being overwhelmed with job applications. The US is the largest market for the firm, which is based in the Netherlands.

“The biggest thing is people just want to hire the best people. It’s very selfish and it’s fine,” Durville said.

Canditech, another firm that offers hiring assessments, says it’s also seen rapid growth in the last year. In 2024, the assessment usage grew 135% compared to the prior year, CEO Guy Barel told BI. He estimates that assessment usage is on track to soar 242% year-over-year.

Barel says the surge is partly due to the job market tipping more in favor of employers. In many cases, companies he works with are flooded with “tons of candidates” and looking to “move forward as fast as possible,” he said.

Criteria, another skills-based assessment provider, says test usage has more than doubled in recent years.

“AI is kind of creating this authenticity crisis in talent acquisition, because everyone can and is putting their résumé into ChatGPT.” Criteria CEO Josh Millet told BI. “It’s all about demonstrating your ability or your skill or your personality in an objective way that’s a little bit harder to fake.”

The AI job market

Jeff Hyman, a veteran recruiter and the CEO of Recruit Rockstars, estimates that demand for testing among his clients has increased by around 50% over the last 18 months.

That’s due to a handful of different reasons, he said — but companies being inundated by job applications is near the top, thanks to candidates leaning more on AI to gain an edge and send out résumés en masse, he says.

Hyman says a typical job he tries to fill for a client has around 300 to 500 applicants, though he’s spoken to companies trying to fill roles with more than 1,000 candidates within several days of being posted online.

The number of job applications in the US grew at more than four times the pace of job requisitions in the first half of 2024, according to a report from WorkDay.

Companies also want to test candidates’ soft skills as remote work grows more common, Hyman adds — and they want to be sure they’re getting the right person. Depending on the size of the organization, a bad hire can cost a company anywhere from $11,000 to $24,000, a survey conducted by CareerBuilder in 2016 found.

According to TestGorilla, 69% of employers who issued tests this year said they were interested in assessing soft skills, while 50% said they were interested in assessing a candidate’s cognitive ability. A separate survey by Criteria ranked emotional intelligence as the most sought-after skill among employers, followed by analytical thinking.

“It’s about their personality and to see if they are a good fit to the organization, if they share the same DNA,” Durville said, though he noted that, in many cases, companies find the results of the tests to be shaky as a sole evaluation metric.

TestGorilla, Canditech, and Criteria told BI that employers say they’re enjoying the time and cost savings of administering tests.

According to TestGorilla, 82% of employers who said they used skills-based hiring — a catch-all term for hiring based on proven skills — said they were satisfied with new hires, compared to 73% of US employers on average.

Canditech, meanwhile, claims its assessments can help employers cut down on hiring time by as much as 50%, and reduce “unnecessary interviews” by as much as 80%, according to its website.

But Hyman thinks there are some issues with hiring tests. For one, he says employers turn down candidates who don’t score well “all the time,” despite them being otherwise qualified for the job.

The trend also appears to be turning off job candidates. Hyman estimates around 10%-20% of applicants will outright refuse to take a test if employers introduce it as a first step in the hiring process, though that’s a practice Canditech’s Barel says is becoming increasingly common.

Hyman says he frequently has conversations with employers urging them not to put so much weight on test results, due to the potential for a mis-hire.

“That’s lazy hiring, to be honest. I think that’s not the right way to go about it,” he said.

ISLAMABAD: The Power Division has assured development partners that commercial operations of the Competitive Trading Bilateral Contract Market (CTBCM) are expected to begin by the end of September 2025.

The new system will allow bulk power consumers with a demand of 1 MW or more to purchase electricity through direct contracts with competitive suppliers.

The operationalisation of the Independent System and Market Operator will be a key part of this transition. The framework for open access charges and the allocation of wheeling capacity is in the final stages of preparation.

A phased market opening will follow, supported by the establishment of market rules and wheeling charges.

During a meeting with representatives of nearly a dozen development partners, the Power Division discussed updates on power sector reforms, industrial and agriculture pricing packages, grid capacity strategy, and distribution sector reforms, including private sector participation and investment readiness.

The Power Division said capacity costs, denominated in US dollars, have risen from Rs 11.1 per kWh to Rs 18.8 per kWh due to currency depreciation. However, fuel costs have remained steady with the addition of lower-cost generation.

The government said it aims to de-link capacity costs from currency movements and increase reliance on domestic energy sources for long-term sustainability.

Electricity tariffs remain high due to taxes and duties, adding pressure on consumers. The circular debt continues to grow due to inefficiencies and poor debt pricing. A roadmap to address this debt is under development.

Inefficient pricing has raised debt servicing costs and reduced demand.

The government has introduced the Bijli Sahulat package for the winter, offering power at marginal cost plus a small margin. A similar approach is being considered for industrial users to boost grid usage without adding subsidies.

The mechanism would offer marginal pricing while protecting fixed cost recovery through base tariffs.

To increase consumption, the government has proposed a three-year package from March 2025 to December 2027 for industrial and agricultural users. The plan projects an increase in demand of 3,745 MW in March–June 2025, 10,720 MW in 2026, and 11,018 MW in 2027.

The proposed rate is Rs 22 per unit for both sectors, with industrial users saving Rs 10.50 per unit and agricultural users saving Rs 7.77 per unit compared to current rates.

Nepra has set total fixed charges at Rs 2.505 trillion based on 106 billion units. A 5–10 percent drop in demand does not reduce these costs due to their fixed nature, highlighting the importance of increasing usage for cost recovery.

Development partners raised the need for clear pricing over the next three to five years and urged the government to avoid policies that shield inefficient domestic industries. They also stressed the need to finalize wheeling charges and market rules by September, track and publish marginal generation costs, accelerate grid and metering upgrades, and begin structured talks with industry on long-term energy policy.

The government said it is preparing a 10-year plan for generation and transmission planning. It also highlighted the importance of digital tools such as SCADA and AMI for data use and performance tracking.

The Energy Infrastructure Development and Management Company will take over planning and execution of PSDP-funded transmission projects by FY26/27. Board approvals are in progress and the CEO hiring is expected by year-end.

ISMO has been formed by combining technical teams from NTDC and CPPA-G, and will handle market operations independently of NTDC.

Ongoing transmission projects aim to expand northward evacuation capacity by 2,000 MW over the next three to four years. Development partners noted the urgency of investing in grid upgrades to meet the projected 25 percent rise in industrial demand.

They flagged several projects delayed at the planning or early implementation stage and urged quick resolution of legacy design and execution issues.

The planned rollout of 35 million advanced metering infrastructure units will require improved digital capacity and change management within distribution companies.