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Morgan Stanley has named Ted Pick as its new chief executive, replacing James Gorman who will bow out from the role after leading the Wall Street bank for nearly 14 years and transforming it into a wealth management behemoth.
The appointment of Pick, who was seen as the frontrunner and will start the job on January 1, comes months after Gorman had announced his plans to step down. Pick runs investment banking and trading for Morgan Stanley and was one of three leading internal candidates for the job alongside Andy Saperstein and Dan Simkowitz.
Pick and Saperstein were co-presidents together, and Simkowitz will now become co-president with Saperstein, Morgan Stanley said on Wednesday. Gorman is to become executive chair of the board of directors.
“The board has unanimously determined that Ted Pick is the right person to lead Morgan Stanley and build on the success the firm has achieved under James Gorman’s exceptional leadership,” Tom Glocer, Morgan Stanley’s lead director, said in a statement.
Pick will inherit a vastly changed bank from the one Gorman took over from John Mack in 2010, less than two years after Morgan Stanley almost failed during the 2008 financial crisis.
Gorman revamped Morgan Stanley to focus on wealth and asset management, crystallising his pivot with quick-fire deals for online trading platform ETrade and asset manager Eaton Vance.
The bank has about $6tn in assets under management and has a target to eventually reach $10tn. Gorman has talked up Morgan Stanley’s chances of reaching $20tn.
The strategy has helped Morgan Stanley’s market capitalisation eclipse that of longtime investment banking rival Goldman Sachs, which was less quick to diversify its business.
But even as Morgan Stanley’s transformation has been cheered by investors, its legacy investment banking business, which gives its brand added prestige, has lagged JPMorgan Chase and Goldman in league tables.
And it has faced a highly publicised investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US attorney’s office in Manhattan over its handling of block trades — a way to sell bulk volumes of stock — in what amounted to the most significant legal probes it has faced in recent years. Morgan Stanley said in May it was in talks about settling the case.
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