Morgan Stanley has become the latest elite Wall Street bank to turn to Main Street for its future growth, adding millions of stock trading millennials to its customer base with the $13bn acquisition of online trading platform ETrade.
The deal — the largest by a global bank since the financial crisis and the second biggest by Morgan Stanley — comes as rival Goldman Sachs chases American consumers with its mass market wealth management business and online bank.
It also comes at a time of consolidation in the US wealth management market, most notably November’s $26bn merger between ETrade’s rivals Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, in the wake of falling fees from stock trading.