Morgan Stanley is revving up its push into retail banking, two months after converting to a bank-holding company, reports the WSJ. The bank is considering various scenarios to increase deposits, including acquisitions of regional banks with a customer base that overlaps with Morgan Stanley’s existing brokerage and asset-management clients. Executives won’t discuss specific targets or predict how quickly Morgan Stanley might strike a deal. The firm already has about $36bn in deposits, ranking it among the 50 largest US banks. A big chunk of that comes from cheque accounts and other products sold to brokerage customers. Those deposit levels are tiny compared with the roughly $800bn in assets Morgan Stanley had as of Oct 31. To broaden its funding base, however, it must rake in new deposits. Some growth will come from existing Morgan Stanley offices in the US. But “turning stockbrokers into pitchmen for money-market accounts and brokerage offices into bank branches is logistically complicated and culturally fraught”, notes the Journal.
