March 4 (Reuters) - Investment banking giant Morgan Stanley has laid off 2,500 employees across all divisions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The cuts are affecting employees in the bank's three major divisions — investment banking and trading, wealth management and investment management — the report said.
Many of the job cuts took place on Wednesday, though the company started announcing layoffs last week, the Journal's report added.
Morgan Stanley
did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters could not independently verify the report.
The bank had a global workforce of 82,992 as of December 31. Based on that figure, the cuts represent about 3% of its total employees.
Morgan Stanley reported a banner year in 2025, with annual revenue hitting a record at the investment banking giant.
It also beat Wall Street estimates for fourth-quarter profit in January, fueled by a 47% jump in investment banking revenue as dealmaking surged and debt underwriting fees nearly doubled.
Banking executives had struck an optimistic tone for 2026 on the back of healthy pipelines for mergers and acquisitions as well as initial public offerings.
Meanwhile, volatile markets amid worries of AI disruption to legacy technology businesses and geopolitical turmoil, continue to boost trading desks as clients reposition portfolios to hedge against risks.
This round of layoffs included private bankers and back-office staff positions in the wealth-management division, the WSJ's report said. Some of those impacted work on doling out mortgages to wealth-management clients, the newspaper added.
More broadly, the start of the year has seen massive layoffs across U.S. companies as they streamline operations amid rising adoption of artificial intelligence tools.
Late last month, Jack Dorsey-led payments firm Block said it had cut over 4,000 jobs, nearly half its workforce, as part of an overhaul to embed AI across its operations.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Shinjini Ganguli)
