The Secret Sauce Morgan Stanley’s CEO Is Leaving for His Successor — The Information

Over the past five years, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman spent $14 billion buying the pieces of what is now the world’s second-biggest provider of corporate stock plans. It was a bold bet to get an inside track to people sitting on valuable company equity who one day will be rich.

The business now oversees plans with 12 million individual participants at 2,100 public companies and 1,000 private companies, bank executives told The Information. Clients have included Stripe, Uber and Dropbox. Now the open question is whether Morgan Stanley can convince those individuals to let it manage their wealth whenever they’re able to cash in on the equity.