Title: Associate, Multicultural Innovation Lab, Morgan Stanley
Home base: New York
Mentor:
Legacy recruit: Clark didn’t have to look far for a role model in her field. Her mother, Ranjana, is a high-ranking executive at MUFG and is familiar to all those who follow the annual most powerful women rankings. But that didn’t mean Clark was destined to end up in financial services. Instead, her mother encouraged her to focus on her own passion, whatever that might be. “My route into finance was more due to a passion for the markets and an excitement about the energy that defines the industry,” Clark said. Her mother provides a lot of support, while still being “hands off” about her career choices. But importantly, “as an example of the fact that women can rise through the ranks of finance despite the gender imbalance people frequently reference at the top,” her mother has been an inspiration.
Accelerated path: Clark is currently on her second assignment in a two-year associate rotational program at Morgan Stanley. She is working with an accelerator that backs female and multicultural leaders of fintech companies. Before that, she focused on the technology sector in a different way, working in investment banking in Silicon Valley. A willingness to take on a variety of assignments is something Clark picked up from her mother. “I’ve been dropped into groups where I knew very few people, where I was coming from behind. That’s what the program I’m in is all about — learning as much as possible as quickly as possible,” Clark said.
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Leading the change: The very nature of Clark’s current assignment in the Multicultural Innovation Lab is disruptive. Her group is helping a diverse group of entrepreneurs navigate the complicated world of running their own companies. Venture capital investors often overlook opportunities with diverse founders, even though they could provide better and more stable returns, Clark said. “What we are doing is very cool, very high impact, and makes a lot of strategic sense from a business sense,” she said. Startups selected for the innovation lab get a $200,000 equity investment plus mentoring, an office in Morgan Stanley’s headquarters, and a full curriculum of training and coaching.
Aspirations: Clark is still figuring out what bigger roles she wants to pursue in banking. But she does know she wants to drive positive change. “I’ve been learning every day and just trying to absorb as much as possible,” she said. “My group is focused on in investing in the next generation of leaders and that is very interesting to me.”
A special bond: Clark and her mother enjoy a close relationship and often travel together, including a trip in June to Paris and countless visits to India, Ranjana’s birth country. The first time Clark can remember traveling to New York was in 2003 for the awards dinner for the Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance. Her mother was on the cover of the magazine that year.
“Looking at how she has developed her career and, as a person, becoming more well-rounded in terms of her technical skillset and in terms of how she presents herself, has been inspiring as I seek to develop myself personally and professionally,” Clark said.
Not all shop talk: During Clark’s year in investment banking in Silicon Valley, she lived with her mother. On the Sundays when neither was working, the pair would have dinner together. “My dad was not invited, as no boys allowed,” she said. “But we talk about interests and passions and some of those are very much related to the markets and the work that we do. Some of that is related to the weekend trips we’ve gone on or the recipes we are trying. It is a healthy balance.”
Little ears, big ideas: “Meera’s advice and voice has always mattered to me,” Ranjana Clark said of her daughter. “Even when she was little, we would have dinner time conversations between her dad and I, and here Meera would be sitting at the table and I would think, ‘She’s a fly on the wall,’ and she’d pipe up with a really important piece of advice, like, ‘Why don’t you talk to so-and-so?’ or ‘Have you thought of that?’ So I think she is very perceptive.”
