Morgan Stanley names Kelleher president; Fleming leaving bank: memo

Morgan Stanley named two other executives, Shelley O’Connor and Andy Saperstein, as the new co-heads of wealth management.

Previously the president of the company’s institutional-banking and trade division, Kelleher will now assume a huge role as he takeovers Fleming’s responsibilities and oversee the firm’s wealth-management division, which is one of the key sectors in Morgan Stanley, Business Insider noted.

Rosenthal, in addition to his role as chief operating officer, will now lead the firm’s digital initiatives for financial advisors and wealth management clients, working closely with O’Connor and Saperstein.

Mr. Gorman picked Mr. Kelleher in part for his experience in running Morgan Stanley’s trading businesses, which are adapting with the rest of Wall Street to a new era of stiffer regulations.

The appointment came after current wealth-management division president Greg Fleming chose to leave the firm to pursue other opportunities.

A trading veteran with a distinctive Cork-native sense of humour, Kelleher was Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer during the 2007 financial crash. “James made it clear that he would be staying on for a number of years as CEO, and that path wouldn’t be open to Greg”. In 2012, Mr. Kelleher won a different power struggle at the firm when investment-banking chief Paul Taubman, a rival of Mr. Kelleher’s, left and Mr. Kelleher was promoted to oversee both trading and investment banking.

During Fleming’s time at Morgan, the wirehouse has significantly grown its wealth management business. He helped grow Morgan Stanley’s wealth management arm into an operation that generated almost half of the firm’s revenue as it shifted away from trading to more stable earnings.

Kelleher’s ascent also marks the second time that Fleming was left at the altar. He has no executive role lined up, one person familiar with the reshuffle tells the publication, and is now teaching financial markets and corporate law at Yale Law School, where he has taught classes in the past, the news service reports. It hired John Thain, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc GS.N executive, to fill the job permanently.

“We overcame the challenges and difficulties of integrating the largest wealth management merger ever, to create an organization that today is the leader by all important measures”, Fleming told employees in a memo.