Morgan Stanley's assignment advising the U.S. Treasury Department on troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was handled by a 39-member team led by Robert Scully, a vice chairman, and Ruth Porat, global head of the financial institutions group. Scully, 58, and Porat, 50, brought different experiences to the project.

Scully made his mark raising equity for major companies and, since December, has been part of the chairman's office at Morgan, focusing on key clients with an emphasis on global sovereign investors. Before that, Scully was co-president with Zoe Cruz, handling asset management, the Discover credit card unit, private equity and senior client relationships while Cruz, who was ousted last year, oversaw investment banking.

But Scully, who earlier in his career spent time as chairman of Morgan's global capital markets unit and vice chairman of investment banking, is probably best known as the manager of the firm's relationship with General Motors Corp., which dates back to his days working at Salomon Brothers.

It was at Salomon that Scully, in the 1980s, worked on GM's sale of Class E and Class H shares to help pay for its acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Hughes Aircraft Co. -- a technique that ushered in "tracking" stocks. In 1988, Scully started his own firm, Scully Brothers & Foss, with his twin brother, an arbitrageur, and Salomon colleague Warren Foss. Five years later, he joined Lehman Brothers Inc. as head of industrials investment banking. In 1996, he decamped to Morgan Stanley -- a move that forced Lehman to split with Morgan its fee for advising GM on its spinoff of EDS.

By 1999, Scully had become a Morgan vice chairman and was soon orchestrating large capital raisings for Accenture Ltd., Tyco International Ltd. and, of course, GM. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School, Scully is married to Nancy Peretsman, a media banker at Allen & Co. LLC.

Porat is a tech-banker-turned-generalist who turned heads in 2006, when she was tapped to run Morgan's financial institutions group. Though an experienced banker, Porat had done little work in the highly specialized and regulated financial services sector.

A graduate of Stanford University, the London School of Economics and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Porat started her Wall Street career with Morgan Stanley, working as an M&A banker from 1987 through 1990.

In 1990, she moved to the financial sponsors group before defecting to Smith Barney to follow Robert Greenhill. When Greenhill bolted in 1996, Porat returned to Morgan and shifted into equity capital markets, where she advised Broadcast.com Inc., Priceline.com Inc., VeriSign Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc. on their IPOs.

After a yearlong stint in London, Porat became a vice chairman and added media and industrials to her portfolio, serving clients such as General Electric Co., Time Warner Inc. and Home Depot Inc. She was also on the Morgan Stanley team that co-underwrote the NYSE Group Inc.'s $1.9 billion follow-on offer.