BlackRock Inc., the world's biggest asset manager, hired its long-time strategic and financial adviser Gary Shedlin as chief financial officer to replace Ann Marie Petach, who will move to a client-oriented role within the firm.

Petach will be a senior managing director at BlackRock Solutions, New York-based BlackRock said yesterday in a statement. Shedlin, 49, a former vice chairman of investment banking at Morgan Stanley, will join the firm in March and become CFO after it reports its first-quarter earnings in April.

“Gary has an intimate knowledge of BlackRock and knows our industry well,” Laurence D. Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock, said in the statement. “I am confident that he will lead our finance operations as a partner in driving our business through our next phase of disciplined growth.”

BlackRock has hired executives such as Philipp Hildebrand, the former head of the Swiss central bank, to help expand relationships with institutional clients overseas, and Linda Robinson, who joined as head of marketing and communications in 2011 to oversee a five-year branding campaign. Fink also revamped management as fund performance has trailed, including replacing the group that oversees investment products with five specialized units in August, the most sweeping overhaul since BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors in 2009.

Shedlin will be responsible for BlackRock's corporate finance functions such as accounting and tax, treasury and risk management. He'll also join BlackRock's global executive committee, which added eight executives during the reorganization announced in August.

Shedlin joined Morgan Stanley in 2010 from Citigroup Inc., where he was chairman of the bank's investment-banking effort for financial institutions.

He was part of a team of investment bankers at Morgan Stanley that last year were charged with assessing the value of the brokerage jointly owned by Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. The two banks were in a dispute over the value of the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney business, which ended in an agreement for Morgan Stanley to buy the rest of the unit in pieces through 2015.

Petach will work with client offerings for public and private pension funds. She previously was the treasurer at Ford Motor Co., where she was responsible for pension, banking and risk-management.

As part of the reorganization in August, BlackRock created two client-oriented units that are responsible for distributing products to investors, instead of relying on a single global client group. The first one is made up of BlackRock Solutions, the unit that advises financial institutions and governments on hard-to-value assets, and the institutional group. The second includes sales of iShares, BlackRock's exchange-traded fund business, and retail funds.

The company oversaw $3.79 trillion as of Dec. 31.

Bloomberg News

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BlackRock Hires Morgan Stanley&rsquo;s Shedlin as CFO

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