A Wall Street Lifer’s Quixotic Quest to Build a Nonracist Bank
Alex Ehrlich started Percapita to reach the underbanked while making money. It hasn’t been easy.
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.