Haik and Potel become co-heads of ECM at Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley has promoted Justin Haik and Ronnie Potel to co-heads of equity capital markets for Asia-Pacific as it continues to grow its capital markets platform in the region.

The pair will keep their existing roles in addition to the new responsibilities, making this less of a reshuffle than a recognition of a job well done and a way for the bank to add management resources to cope with a growing business across products.

Haik, who is head of equity syndicate for Asia-Pacific and a 13-year veteran at Morgan Stanley, is already doing a lot of equity origination and client-facing work, so his new title is a natural progression of his role within the firm. Potel joined Morgan Stanley in June 2010 as head of equity-linked origination for Asia-Pacific and will now get the opportunity to work with a broader range of products — a good use of his skill set and experience at a time when the primary convertible bond market has ground to a virtual halt.

Their appointments, which were announced through an internal email and took affect at the beginning of the month, will also free up time for the co-heads of global capital markets, Crawford Jamieson and George Taylor, to put more focus on other parts of the business where Morgan Stanley is seeing a lot of opportunities. These include fixed-income capital markets (FICM), lending, derivatives, and of course the recently established securities joint venture in China — although as co-heads of ECM, Haik and Potel will obviously also be highly involved both with the latter and with the equity derivatives business.

Jamieson and Taylor were co-heads of ECM when they were appointed co-heads of global capital markets (GCM) in January 2010 and until now had kept their ECM responsibilities as well (GCM comprises both ECM and FICM, which at other firms is typically referred to as debt capital markets). They are now giving up the day-to-day running of the ECM division, but they will remain closely involved in the business and sources at the bank say they are likely to continue to make use of their client relationships to originate deals from time to time. However, the appointment of Haik and Potel will make the GCM management structure more symmetrical again. The Asia FICM business is headed by Julien Begasse.

Meanwhile, the firm has also promoted Mark Burmeister to head of GCM for Australia. Burmeister is also a relative newcomer to Morgan Stanley, having joined as head of Australia ECM in June 2010. His new role will have him oversee fixed-income capital markets as well. Morgan Stanley hasn’t previously had a head of GCM in Australia and the promotion of Burmeister is a reflection of the increased size and importance of this business. The Australia FICM business is led by Patrick Mullins.

According to Dealogic data, Morgan Stanley ranked second in the ECM league table for Asia-Pacific in the first nine months this year after Goldman Sachs with a 7% market share, and leads the block trade business year-to-date with 24 deals and a 27.1% market share. Goldman Sachs is second with 14 deals and a 16.4% market share.

Morgan Stanley is third in the DCM ranking for Asia-Pacific in the first nine months after two Japanese banks, although in the league table for Asia-Pacific ex-Japan it doesn’t make the top 10.

According to the internal announcement, Haik has been a “critical senior member” of the bank’s ECM franchise for the past six years. During his 13-year career with the bank he has worked in New York, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Potel joined Morgan Stanley from Standard Chartered where he was global head of origination for equity-linked securities for about 10 months. Before that he was head of equity-linked origination for Asia-Pacific at Citi for almost four years and worked in the equity-linked origination team at Deutsche Bank in London, Hong Kong and Japan for another five years. He was pursuing a career as a barrister before joining Deutsche.