One more heavy hitter in banking from the 1990s has decided to call it quits.
Douglas A. Warner 3d said Wednesday he would retire at yearend as the chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which he helped form last year by agreeing to sell his white-shoe investment banking firm, J.P. Morgan & Co., to Chase Manhattan Corp.
William B. Harrison Jr., Morgan Chases president and chief executive officer, will also assume the chairmans title when Mr. Warner retires.
Mr. Warner, 55, has spent the last year acting as Morgan Chases senior ambassador to existing and potential customers. He did not have specific day-to-day operational duties, except to sit on the companys executive committee. He was in St. Louis the morning of the announcement to attend a meeting of the board of Anheuser-Busch Cos., of which he is a director.
He said he will be leaving as the integration of the two companies is concluded. With my assignment completed, it seems appropriate on the first anniversary of last Septembers merger announcement to set out on the next phase of my career, he said in a press statement.
Mr. Warner is one of only a few J.P. Morgan veterans still in the top ranks of the new company. Others include Walter A. Gubert, the head of European operations and investment banking, and Thomas B. Ketchum, the head of technology.
Mr. Harrison and the other senior executives came from Chase and its predecessors. Geoffrey T. Boisi, the head of investment banking, came from Beacon Group, a private boutique acquired last year by Chase. David A. Coulter, the head of consumer banking, also came from Beacon, but he is also the former CEO of the old California-based BankAmerica Corp.
Mr. Warner, who was at the helm for several seismic shifts in J.P. Morgans culture, will almost certainly be best remembered for forging the deal that created Morgan Chase.
In the end, he saw that his most efficacious course was to merge with another company, said Diane Glossman, an analyst at UBS Warburg.
Analysts also said that Mr. Warner was a key figure throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the transformation from a commercial bank to an investment banking firm. J.P. Morgan was the first commercial bank since the 1930s to be granted the power to underwrite debt and equity securities.
Under Mr. Warner, the firm ended lifelong job security as a result of a 1998 restructuring. One of his biggest cultural marks on J.P. Morgan was the creation of the House Arrest group, a dozen or so senior executives who met monthly to discuss management issues. He will leave just as Morgan Chase puts the final touches on a yearlong integration of global staff and operations.
The capital markets, whose strength last year promised to make the Chase-Morgan deal an instant success, are suffering from their worst downturn in years. Like other companies with huge capital markets operations, Morgan Chase laid off employees amid a drought in securities underwriting and mergers and acquisitions advisory work.
Those cuts came while the company was merging staffs, but it has acknowledged that the number of job cuts, originally estimated at 5,000, will probably be much higher. Most of the overlaps in investment banking have been taken care of already, but the company still has to make cuts in its technology and operations staff.
Before the Chase-J.P. Morgan deal, Mr. Warner, a native Ohioan known to nearly everyone as Sandy, had spent his entire career at J.P. Morgan, which he joined in 1968 after graduating from Yale University, where he was a pre-med student. He rose through the ranks in various positions in London and New York and succeeded Dennis Weatherstone in 1994 as CEO.
Several other high-profile bankers from the last decade who have built their companies through mergers have also retired in the last year, leaving their companies to a new crew of managers. Bank of Americas Hugh L. McColl, Citigroup Inc.s John S. Reed, and First Union Corp.s Edward E. Crutchfield have all said farewell to commercial banking.
