Morgan Stanley has played a dominant role in investment banking in the technology sector for a long time, serving as underwriter for many of the biggest global tech IPOs in the world like VeriSign, Inc., Dolby Laboratories, Cisco, Netscape, Compaq, Cogent, Inc., Broadcast.com, Priceline, Brocade, Broadcom Corp., Groupon, and Google.
Aside from being the year that the company led the largest online IPO in the history of the United States for Google, 2004 was also the year that Morgan Stanley achieved the best kind of rankings in its own history, bagging the top spot for global equity trading, global equity underwriting, and global IPO market share and second place for global debt underwriting, and completed global M&A.
In 2008, Morgan Stanley announced that it would become a traditional bank holding company regulated under the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve approved the company’s bid to become a bank, ending the bill that Congress set in place 75 years ago. In the same year, Japan’s largest bank, the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, invested on Morgan Stanley for $9 billion. This represented the largest single physical check to be ever signed, delivered, and subsequently cashed. Over the years, Morgan Stanley boasts of being recognized as one of the top companies to work for several times.