Morgan Stanley CEO ‘super pumped’ as deal pipelines stay resilient

By Tatiana Bautzer and Manya Saini

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO Ted Pick told investors on Tuesday he expected the Wall Street bank to have a strong end to the quarter after U.S. tariff announcements paused activity in April.

“I’m super pumped up about the businesses,” Pick said at an annual financial conference hosted by his bank. Dealmaking and the calendar for equity capital markets are picking up, while deal discussions have stayed resilient and become more active in some areas, he added.

Morgan Stanley is the lead underwriter of financial technology company Chime’s (CHIM.PVT) initial public offering, which is expected to close later this week and raise as much as $832 million.

The bank also led IPOs for Hinge Health (HNGE), raising $437.3 million, and marketing tech firm MNTN (MNTN), which raised $187.2 million, in May.

“We had maximum tariff volatility through the first half of the quarter,” he said, adding deals were paused through April and part of May. That has been changing over the last weeks.

On M&A, Morgan Stanley advised financial firm TJC in the sale of Silvus Technologies to Motorola for $5 billion and AT&T on the $5.75 billion acquisition of Lumen Technologies’ consumer fiber operations.

Pick also cited the bank’s role in advising Toyota’s special board committee on the proposal to take the company private.

The Morgan Stanley CEO said changes in the banking regulatory framework would be welcome, and that if rules to calculate the supplementary leverage ratio, known as SLR, change, the bank may be able to analyze potential acquisitions.

Pick has been one of the most optimistic CEOs during market volatility after the announcement of tariffs. While presenting strong first-quarter profit in April, he said he was “cautiously optimistic that we won’t go into recession”.

Morgan Stanley reported record equity trading revenue in the first quarter, with a 45% jump from a year earlier. Pick took the helm as CEO a year and a half ago, and last month also became chairman of the board as former Chairman and CEO James Gorman left the bank.

Gorman had turned Morgan Stanley into a wealth management behemoth during his tenure, raising the bank’s profits and turning results more predictable.

Last March, Morgan Stanley began laying off 2,000 employees, around 3% of its global workforce, to improve operational efficiency. The bank followed decisions by Wall Street rivals to cut jobs to prepare for a potential downturn.

(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer in New York and Manya Saini in Bengaluru, editing by Lananh Nguyen, Franklin Paul and Jan Harvey)