Ruth Porat
CFO, Morgan Stanley
With Morgan Stanley taking over sole ownership of the Smith Barney franchise, Ruth Porat's already heady Street influence has grown even more authoritative.
The brokerage business, formerly operated as a joint venture with Citigroup and now part of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, will deliver fee-based revenue from more than 16,000 financial advisers and is expected to gain $57 billion in additional deposits by 2015.
As CFO, Porat will be a key decision-maker on how to put those deposits to work. (The firm will be one of the 10 biggest U.S.-based depository institutions after the transition.) That's in addition to her usual role of overseeing capital, liquidity, funding, and compliance with capital requirements for Morgan Stanley, not to mention her work earlier this year in obtaining board approval for a $500 million share buyback.
Even outside Morgan Stanley, where she has worked for 26 years, Porat continues to build a powerful industry presence in her ongoing efforts to improve public trust in the financial system. In January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, she described stress-testing and additional transparency as necessary steps to enhancing stakeholders' faith in U.S banks - and spoke of a need for all corporate leaders to set the "tone from the top."
Porat is a member of the U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, which assesses macroeconomic views and makes recommendations on technical issues related to debt management. She also is a trustee at her alma mater, Stanford University.
