Morgan Stanley promotes 184 to managing director in smaller class

Bloomberg

Morgan Stanley elevated 184 employees to managing director, a smaller number of promotions to the firm’s top rank from last year.
A record 38% are women, pushing the share of female MDs at the New York-based firm up to 24%, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Of the US-based employees who were promoted, 5% are Black, 2% Hispanic and 21% Asian, the person said.
Morgan Stanley’s leadership has been mostly male and White for decades, as has been the case across Wall Street. In the US, 30% of the firm’s new managing directors are considered ethnically diverse. The managing director class is smaller than it was last year, when 199 employees were made MD in Morgan Stanley’s biggest batch of promotions to the role in a decade.
Wealth management, where Morgan Stanley benefited from higher net interest income as a result of rising rates, reported revenue of $6.62 billion, up 5.9% from a year earlier. The New York-based firm’s trading operation posted $3.6 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, worse than the $4.07 billion analysts had forecast.
The bank, which now leans on its wealth- and asset-management business for more than half its revenue, saw assets in the unit rose from the third quarter to $4.19 trillion. Morgan Stanley has a target of $1 trillion in net new assets in wealth management every three years, and a longer term goal of $10 trillion in client assets.
“We have seen a healthy start to the year,” Chief Financial Officer Sharon Yeshaya said in an interview. “A lot of it hinges on the economic outlook and whether we have seen a peak in inflation and a policy pivot.”
Morgan Stanley executives have been preaching confidence heading into 2023 in the hopes that their business model will avoid getting caught up in any consumer-market strain, while a rebound in asset prices and capital-markets activity would prove a boon for the firm.