When Morgan Stanley unveils what’s expected to be one of its best quarters ever, a new voice will lead Wall Street through the numbers and the strategy.
Sharon Yeshaya has been known to Morgan Stanley’s top brass ever since Chief Executive Officer James Gorman plucked the former trader out of the firm’s then-struggling fixed-income division and made her his chief of staff. Soon, the finance world will become familiar with Yeshaya, after her recent ascent to chief financial officer.
In her first interview since that appointment, the 41-year-old Morgan Stanley lifer recalled her unusual trajectory—harboring doubts about finance as a junior banker, jumping to a trading unit that was soon upended by the 2008 financial crisis, and then nervously interviewing to get out. Before becoming CFO, she headed investor relations.
Yeshaya’s latest promotion, revealed in May, came alongside the elevation of four white men who were cementing their status as potential CEO candidates. The moves set off some buzz across Wall Street and in Washington. The slate even prompted a question from a U.S. senator on the lack of diversity in the bank’s top rungs. She has thoughts on fixing that too.
The following are excerpts from an interview, edited for length and clarity. Morgan Stanley is set to report second-quarter results Thursday morning.
The offer to become CFO was a surprise.
Gorman “asked me directly not that soon before the announcement came out if I’d be interested in being CFO of the firm. He was jovial and he was nice and he was very complimentary. I did not expect that to be the conversation that we were having. I did not think that that was the next step, no.
“The role of the CFO, over the course of the last 10 years has evolved to be a more strategic role, and a different type of role than it was. And I think that the IR function at Morgan Stanley has always had somewhat of a more strategic lens than possibly at other institutions.”
She arrived amid the dot-com boom. After the bust came doubts.
“I went to Penn, I actually started in the college and transferred to Wharton. I remember the concept of supply and demand being new to me. I did a dual degree between economics, which I thought was theory, and finance, which was the practical implementation. I did have aspirations to do something one day in public policy.
“For those who have ever been to Penn or went to Wharton, the most obvious next step is usually to go into an investment bank. At the time Morgan Stanley had an M&A technology group and I did that for the summer of 2000 during this sort of dot-com boom. So it was quite interesting, and I received an offer to come back and join full time in 2001.
“It was a challenging place to work. I was starting, and then 9/11 occurred soon thereafter. It was a difficult time both to be in New York and to go through the tech bust. The deals that I ended up working on were less on the up-and-up. It was just probably less interesting than I had personally hoped or wanted. So I was at a crossroads after the first two years, and questioned whether I wanted to leave Morgan Stanley.”