Morgan Stanley's No. 2 Executive, Colm Kelleher, to Retire -- Update
28 Março 2019 - 8:45PM
Dow Jones News
By Liz Hoffman
Morgan Stanley's second-in-command, Colm Kelleher, is retiring,
opening a seat whose filling will signal the Wall Street firm's
likely heir apparent.
Mr. Kelleher, who joined Morgan Stanley in 1989, is older than
Chief Executive James Gorman and wasn't considered a candidate to
succeed him. As the firm's president, he has overseen its
restructuring from an undisciplined and error-prone investment bank
to a stabler financial-services giant.
Mr. Gorman praised his lieutenant's "fierce competitive streak"
and candor. "I just trust the guy," he said in an interview
Thursday.
Mr. Kelleher, 61 years old, was Morgan Stanley's chief financial
officer during the crisis, when he helped pull it back from the
brink -- by shrinking its balance sheet, negotiating a $9 billion
lifeline from Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and
working with regulators to convert the firm to a bank holding
company.
He won an internal power battle in the lean postcrisis years,
outlasting rivals for Mr. Gorman's favor, including investment
banker Paul Taubman and asset-management chief Greg Fleming. He
turned down offers of CEO jobs at banks including Barclays PLC and
Lloyds Banking Group PLC, according to people familiar with the
matter.
He had come up in the trading businesses and understood risk
management, areas less familiar to Mr. Gorman, a former McKinsey
consultant who ran wealth and asset management.
Mr. Gorman elevated him to president in 2014, and he quickly
assumed the role of enforcer, executing the strategy set by his
more analytical boss. He led the move to lay off one-quarter of the
firm's bond traders in 2015 and pushed the firm's retail brokers
and investment bankers to work more closely together.
"James steered the ship, Colm ran the engine room," said a top
Morgan Stanley executive.
Mr. Gorman said he is in no rush to fill Mr. Kelleher's seat. He
aims to stay on as CEO for three to five years and is determined to
avoid the messy succession battles that roiled Morgan Stanley in
the 2000s. The firm might name co-presidents, said Mr. Gorman, who
himself shared that title before becoming CEO in 2010.
Leading candidates include Ted Pick, the trading chief who last
year was also given oversight for investment banking; Jonathan
Pruzan, the firm's finance chief, and Andy Saperstein, who co-runs
its giant retail brokerage and has known Mr. Gorman since they were
both at McKinsey in the 2000s.
Born in Ireland but raised in England, Mr. Kelleher is a
literature-quoting, classical music-loving, nattily dressed bon
vivant, as quick to discipline an underling as to invoke a
Napoleonic battle to make a point. Fiercely loyal to the firm, he
refers to JPMorgan Chase & Co. as "Chase," insisting that
Morgan Stanley alone has the claim on the venerable Morgan
name.
After the worst of the financial crisis had passed, he had
commemorative ties and scarfs made for a group of senior
executives. They memorialize the stock's lowest point, $6.71, with
rows of geese, swans and partridges, corresponding to the birds'
assigned numbers in "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
He will retire June 30. He joined the board of railroad Norfolk
Southern Corp. earlier this year in a sign that he plans to stay
involved in business. He plans this fall to walk the Camino de
Santiago, the 500-mile pilgrimage in the Pyrenees.
Write to Liz Hoffman at liz.hoffman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 28, 2019 19:30 ET (23:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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