MBN USA
December 17, 2021
Carla Harris joined Wall Street financial institution in 1987
By Max Abelson,
Bloomberg
Carla Harris, one of the few Black women to rise to the top
echelons of Wall Street, is stepping down as Morgan
Stanley’s vice chairman of wealth management.
She will be a senior client adviser to the firm, according
to an internal memo sent Tuesday.
Harris, 59, who had been chair of the Morgan Stanley
Foundation from 2005 to 2014, joined in 1987 after getting a bachelor’s degree
and her MBA from Harvard University. Then, as now, Wall Street was mostly run
by White men.
“It didn’t intimidate me,” she told Bloomberg News last
year. “That’s what you saw at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, you pick it. So,
you know that if you wanted to play on this playing field, you were going to
have to be comfortable in some cases being the only and being the first. That
was not intimidating to me at all. That was just the way it was.”
Tracking the forces driving change
Last year, Morgan Stanley’s first diversity report showed
that 23 of its 1,705 executives in 2018 were Black men and 14 were Black women.
This year’s diversity report showed that out of 1,056 executives in 2020, 16
were Black men and 18 were Black women. The bank has said that it’s on a
journey that would include some progress, some flatness and some steps back. A
preview of its next generation of top leaders this year mostly resembled the
White and male old guard.
Harris is a Walmart
Inc. director and member of Harvard’s board of overseers. The daughter
of a fishing-boat captain, she was born in Port Arthur, Texas, raised in
Jacksonville, Florida, and has sung gospel for decades. Inside Morgan Stanley,
she ran the firm’s Multicultural Client Strategy Group, where she’ll be
succeeded by Selma Bueno.
“In the most competitive world of high finance, Carla set
the standard of unassailable excellence worthy of generational respect,
admiration and emulation,” Ray McGuire said via text. He was one of Wall
Street’s senior-most Black bankers before
leaving Citigroup Inc. last year to run for mayor of New York.
— With assistance by Sridhar Natarajan
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