Early Struggles Prepare Sharon Yeshaya for Morgan Stanley CFO Role

Sharon Yeshaya has come a long way since her days as a summer intern at Morgan Stanley. The year was 2000, the dot-com bubble hadn't yet burst, and Yeshaya's double undergraduate degrees from Penn and Wharton set the stage for an internship in investment banking. At the end of the summer, Yeshaya received an offer from Morgan Stanley to join full time, but early on, things were far from easy.

"It was a challenging place to work. I was starting, and then 9/11 occurred soon thereafter. It was a difficult time both to be in New York and to go through the tech bust. The deals that I ended up working on were less on the up-and-up," recalled Yeshaya, who began her career at Morgan Stanley as an analyst in the Mergers & Acquisitions department.

Luckily for both parties Yeshaya decided to stick around, and in June 2021, the former intern ascended to the rank of CFO.

For many, this appointment wasn't surprising, as Yeshaya has been a standout at Morgan Stanley for a long time. In 2014, she attracted a lot of attention after James Gorman, the company's CEO, plucked her out of relative obscurity and made her his chief of staff. The move was even more remarkable because it came right before a brutal restructuring that affected 25% of the company's workforce. Clearly, some of the top brass saw something special in Yeshaya.

Interestingly, though, Yeshaya hasn’t spent her career on the management track.

In fact, she is one of comparatively few women to be made Managing Director, at the age of 34, as a trader in the FICC division. Prior to becoming CFO, she served as the head of Investor Relations from 2016 to 2021.

In addition, during the past two decades, she held a variety of roles in the Fixed Income Division before being named co-head of New Product Origination for Derivative Structured Products.

On top of her CFO title, Yeshaya is also an Executive Vice President and serves as a member of the company's Operating and Management committees. Besides Morgan Stanley, she is currently a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Business Committee.