• ML Home
• Investor Relations

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Strengthening Our Culture

At the same time, we're working to evolve our culture to ensure that we maximize our value to clients and shareholders. We have a strong foundation of decency, integrity, dedication, discipline and client focus. Now, we're combining that with an overarching commitment to collaborating across the firm. We need to leverage all the resources we have — spanning business, functional and organizational lines — to be more effective at consistently creating value. Investment banking relationships may have a private equity component or benefit from a structured finance solution. Advisory assignments may offer financing and hedging opportunities. Our institutional capabilities can create and deliver investment products for our private clients. The list goes on and on. It is long and it defines our next set of great opportunities. We've made tremendous progress already, and I'm convinced that we can unleash so much more value from what we've built.

A lot of this comes down to leadership. Our senior management team is among the most professionally and culturally diverse in the industry, and we are working together better than ever before. We complement each other's strengths and expertise and are benefiting tremendously from continuity, which is critical, because all of our achievements are following a steady progression.

In our business, opportunities are defined by market conditions at any given point in time. We add enormous value, have a great brand, market presence, terrific people and an incredible roster of clients, but we cannot control market conditions. What we can control — and what we're focused on — is extracting the maximum value possible for the benefit of our clients, shareholders and employees. We have done a good job — but we can do better. That's good news. There is tremendous upside, because the environment for the intermediate and long term should continue to be very constructive.