Ruth Porat is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; just before that she was Vice Chairman of Investment Banking and Global Head of the Financial Institutions Group, among other positions. During the worst of the financial crisis, she led a team advising both the U.S. Treasury with respect to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York regarding AIG.
Porat credits her success to a few key factors. First has been her ability to throw herself passionately into whatever she does. As important, however, has been the culture of Morgan Stanley which, she says, encourages people to try new roles and move in different directions. “If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’re going to be more effective and more productive,” she says.
An Exciting Trajectory Porat’s first job after graduating from Stanford was at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington where she worked on fraud investigations. She then went on to receive a Masters degree at the London School of Economics where she was awarded a grant to work on a consulting project which took her coincidentally back to the small town in Northern England where she was born. After the LSE, she worked for PriceWaterhouse before entering the Wharton School. She joined Morgan Stanley upon graduating in 1987.
She started at Morgan Stanley in mergers and acquisitions. It was an exciting time to be involved in mergers and acquisitions work, especially at Morgan Stanley, where, says Porat, she was involved in exciting deals -- “the ones every firm wanted but they came to us.”
Two years later, she was asked to help create a new group covering Financial Sponsors. At the time, Morgan Stanley was the first on the Street to have such a group, which may be difficult to imagine given how important this business has become for Wall Street. Before technology stocks boomed in the 1990s, she headed the Firm’s Equity Capital Market technology business, just in time for the height of the Internet market, working with such companies as eBay, Amazon, and Netscape, and then moved to Investment Banking to run the Technology banking business. In 2000 she moved to London, where she spent a year using the lessons she’d learned from Silicon Valley to work with large cap clients. When she returned to New York, her roles included Vice Chairman of Investment Banking and Chairman of Financial Sponsors. Walid Chammah then asked her to assume responsibility for the Financial Institutions Group in 2006 -- where she had one peaceful year before announcing to her group in August 2007 that a financial crisis was at hand and called bankers back from holidays to stay close to their clients. At the end of 2009, CEO James Gorman asked her to take on the CFO role.
A Cool Head During the Crisis For Porat, perhaps the most rewarding work she’s done happened during the recent financial crisis. That’s when she was asked by the U.S. Treasury Department to lead a 39-person Morgan Stanley team to evaluate the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was a six-week whirlwind of round-the-clock work. Then, she was asked by the New York Fed to help tackle the problems at AIG. “It was an opportunity to use skills developed over many years and for Morgan Stanley to do something important for the country,” she says.
Porat, who has three teenage children and is married to a lawyer, points to her own mother as a crucial role model. “Her view was a woman should have a career. It was a more exciting way to go through life,” she says. “It never occurred to me I would do otherwise.” In fact, for Porat, it’s not a matter of work-life balance, as much as finding an interesting mix of activities.
Although Porat has assumed a variety of roles at Morgan Stanley, she doesn’t think that’s necessarily the right path for everyone. “For me the right thing to do was to move into different areas of the Firm as opportunities arose. And the Firm’s culture allows people to move, but it also allows people to find a passion and stay in an area for their entire career. The choice is up to each of us.”
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