Awards for Excellence 2018
Morgan Stanley’s journey to the very top of US investment banking has been built on a fairly simple principle: to give the best advice and execution to its clients. There will be few firms that do not claim to have a similar ambition, but the difference at Morgan Stanley, under president Colm Kelleher, is just how much of the business is set up and run with precisely these objectives in mind.
Take the organization of its financing operations: one centrally managed syndicate function and co-located product teams. And that’s not to mention the unusually long tenure of its senior product staff – after 20 years of working together, many can finish each other’s deals as well as their sentences.
Clients across the investment bank are spoken of in relationship, not transactional, terms. Its bankers talk of being product-agnostic, but the firm is no longer wasting effort trying to create jacks of all trades and masters of none. Getting the connections to work internally, so that product specialists can be brought into the conversation quickly and flexibly, has ended up being more important than having people expected to speak on everything.