Morgan Stanley's big French M&A guy didn't want to be a chairman forever, then

There is a long-running debate in investment banking concerning the optimal use of senior client people who can bring in deals wearing suits lined with goat hair while spending years nurturing clients like Elon Musk to eventually earn $100m of fees on the SpaceX IPO. 

Should these bankers be managing teams? Or should they just be left to schmooze? 

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If you are in the latter mould, you might become the chairman of an investment banking business. Being chairman of an investment bank is not the same as being chairman of a corporate. As chairman of an investment bank, you are typically spared the need to manage juniors and to conduct appraisals and you are free to cruise around talking strategy with clients. 

The consummate chairman is Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley. Grimes didn't like meetings even when he was co-head of technology investment banking for Morgan Stanley, and was reportedly absolved from attending both management committee meetings and firmwide strategy sessions at the bank. Now that he's group chair of investment banking for Morgan Stanley, these are presumably far from his calendar.

Not everyone wants the pure schmooze of chairmanship, though. Yesterday, Jean-Baptiste Charlet, chairman of investment banking for France at Morgan Stanley launched himself back into the fray of strategy sessions with a new job as country officer and head of banking for Citi in France. Citi seemed very pleased with this. In a statement to Reuters, the bank said: "Jean-Baptiste ​brings exceptional ​leadership, ⁠deep client relationships, and a ​successful origination and ​execution ⁠track record across the French and European ⁠markets." ​

Citi declined to comment for this article and Charlet didn't respond to a request to comment, but it's worth noting that he hadn't been chairman at Morgan Stanley for very long. 

Between 2021 and the start of this year, Charlet had been co-head of investment banking for France at Morgan Stanley with David Benichou. But Benichou joined Goldman Sachs in France in July and Charlet became a chairman at Morgan Stanley around January. In May, Morgan Stanley's French business then appointed some new co-heads of the investment bank in the form of Alexandre Bartolin, its EMEA head of transportation and infrastructure banking, and Frédéric Proust, a French MD. Charlet was thus untethered from his previous role and free to roam among French clients.

Maybe Charlet enjoyed this, but his LinkedIn profile still says he's co-head for investment banking France at Morgan Stanley, suggesting possible nostalgia for the pre-January days. 

At Citi, Charlet has his old kind of bigger job back and will presumably be in all the meetings associated with it. As Bank of America's EMEA head Jeff Tannenbaum told Financial News earlier this month, some people like this kind of thing. It also might help that Citi ranks 8th for investment banking revenues in France this year according to Dealogic, while Morgan Stanley is outside the top 10.

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