So You Want to Start a Nonracist Bank

A Wall Street lifer’s quixotic quest to build a truly inclusive finance company

- Max Abelson and Jordyn Holman

It hit him before the pandemic and before the summer of protests. Alex Ehrlich, a 40-year veteran of some of the world’s biggest banks, would leave his executive position at Morgan Stanley to build a financial institution that looked much different than the ones where he’d spent his career.

Anyone who’s been on Wall Street that long knows something is wrong there. Things had improved since the early days of Ehrlich’s career, when women and Black people were all but shut out of executive suites, but much of the industry’s money and power remain in the same hands today. Black people and women talk about it, and so do some rich, White, well- connected, middle-aged executives.

Ehrlich is one of the latter. He worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for decades, was a managing director at UBS AG, and was helping run the prime brokerage business at Morgan Stanley, servicing hedge funds and chairing the investment bank’s diversity council, when his epiphany hit. “We’ll start a bank, and we’ll get it right from the beginning,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek soon after stepping down from Morgan Stanley in January 2020. “The single most important conclusion I came to personally was that banks are really, really challenged simply by their history and their size.”