NEW YORK–Credit unions may be getting another new entrant in retail financial services. Two months after converting to a bank-holding company, Morgan Stanley said it is considering a variety of 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.
The external environment seems to be aligned for us to become bigger in this space," says James Gorman, a Morgan Stanley co-president who is leading the retail-banking push.
Executives won't discuss specific targets or predict how quickly Morgan Stanley might strike a deal. The firm already has about $36 billion in deposits, ranking it among the 50 largest U.S. banks. A big chunk of those deposits comes from checking accounts and other products sold to brokerage customers.
Those deposit levels are tiny compared with the roughly $800 billion in assets Morgan Stanley had as of Oct. 31. To broaden its funding base, the firm needs to rake in a pile of new deposits. Gorman says the number of branches and automated-teller machines, types of products and how Morgan Stanley plans to market them are undecided.
