Morgan Stanley MD quits banking, moves from Wall Street to South America

This senior investment banker has recently undergone a few monumental changes: He is leaving banking for a CFO role in industry, and he is moving from Wall Street to...Argentina.

Up until a few days ago, Alejandro Matoso was a managing director in the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley’s New York headquarters, where he worked for seven years. He earned the promotion to MD in 2015. At the beginning of this month, he moved to Cañuelas, Argentina, a town just outside of Buenos Aires where dulce de leche was invented.

Why? Because he accepted the position of CFO at food corporation Molino Cañuelas.

The timing of his move is interesting, because last year Molino Cañuelas got an $80m financing package from Rabobank and IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, and just last week selected Itau BBA, J.P. Morgan and UBS to lead an initial public offering. The company evidently wanted to bring a seasoned investment banker in-house before it goes public, and Matoso, as a native Argentinian, was a logical choice.

It is unclear whether Morgan Stanley was in the running to underwrite the upcoming Molino Cañuelas IPO, but prior to joining the firm, Matoso worked in the investment banking division at UBS, so he’ll be working with some of his former colleagues to prepare for his new employer's equity sale on the New York Stock Exchange.

While it may seem to be a huge departure for a senior Wall Street investment banker to change continents and jump over to the corporate side of the fence, it is actually a career move that brings Matoso full circle. After graduating with a BS in industrial engineering from the University of Buenos Aires, he moved to Detroit to work as a finance supervisor for the Ford Motor Co. He then decided to get his MBA at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and joined UBS after his graduation.