The thing that Vikram Pandit remembers most about joining Morgan Stanley in 1983 is the way a small firm preserves its culture.
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“I was interviewed by many of the partners,” recalls Pandit. “And the dominant theme was doing first-class business in a first-class way. It was a big driver of people’s behaviour, of how they conducted business and ultimately their careers.” President and chairman Richard Fisher was a big influence. He was an early enthusiast for computerized analysis of financial data. “Modern finance theory was just beginning to be put into practice,” says Pandit.
He soon found himself in the equities business, building a modern equity capital markets department, with product specialists knowledgeable about cash and derivatives markets covering issuers and dealing with syndicate.
US firms were exporting their way of organizing capital markets to the rest of the world.
