Morgan Stanley shakes up senior management team

Morgan Stanley elevated two of its longtime executives to bigger jobs, highlighting a pair of strategic priorities for the Wall Street firm while offering additional clues on its succession plans.

Edward Pick, 46 years old, who oversaw the revival of Morgan Stanley’s stock-trading arm after the financial crisis, was named global head of sales and trading, according to a memorandum sent to Morgan Stanley employees Thursday. The new role gives Mr. Pick oversight of fixed-income trading, a key profit driver for banks that has been challenged by new regulations.

Morgan Stanley also tabbed Dan Simkowitz, an investment banker who co-led the firm’s stock- and debt-underwriting business, to be head of investment management, reporting directly to Chairman and CEO James Gorman, the memo said. Overshadowed by the firm’s wealth-advisory business, which had doubled in size in recent years through the acquisition of Citigroup Inc.’s Smith Barney brokerage, the money-management division had previously fit within the remit of Gregory Fleming, one of the firm’s two presidents serving under Mr. Gorman.

Mr. Simkowitz, 50 years old, will join Mr. Pick on the firm’s operating committee, said the memo, signed by Mr. Gorman, Mr. Fleming and Colm Kelleher, president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking and trading businesses.

“We always need to look to our future while managing the present,” the three executives wrote in the memo. “Our future includes developing strong executives to serve at the most senior levels of the firm, ensuring we regularly bring new energy and intensity to areas where we can move the needle over the next five years.”

Messrs. Pick and Simkowitz each ran one of the firm’s flagship businesses, and both joined Morgan Stanley in 1990. They will now be tasked with overseeing divisions with less impressive track records, fixed income and investment management. Their promotions follow other moves Mr. Gorman has made this year to cultivate a group of managers who may one day succeed him or his top two deputies, Messrs. Kelleher and Fleming.

Mr. Simkowitz’s appointment marks the latest Morgan Stanley investment banker to cross over into another division, part of a push by Mr. Gorman to round out the experience of rising executives at the firm.

Morgan Stanley executives had privately speculated for months that Mr. Gorman would promote Mr. Pick, whose group has overtaken Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as Wall Street’s biggest equities business in recent quarters. Mr. Simkowitz had worked on some of biggest initial public offerings in history, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Facebook Inc. and served as a key adviser to the U.S . government on General Motors Co.’s share sale.

In a separate memo, Morgan Stanley announced that Mo Assomull, 42, will become the firm’s sole head of global capital markets.

Source: MarketWatch