Morgan Stanley logged a small uptick in earnings for the fourth quarter of 2015.

The wealth management arm of US-listed Morgan Stanley has reported pre-tax income from continuing operations of $768 million in the fourth quarter of 2015, up around 4 per cent from the $736 million result a year earlier.

Net revenues stood at $3.8 billion in the fourth quarter, the firm said in a statement. Asset management fee revenues of $2.1 billion were essentially unchanged from a year ago, reflecting the impact of lower markets offset by positive flows. There were transactional revenues of $861 million, down from $976 million a year ago, primarily reflecting lower commission revenues and lower levels of new issue activity.

A number of major US banking groups, such as JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have issued quarterly and full-year results in recent days.

Morgan Stanley said that net interest income of $779 million increased from $625 million a year ago on higher deposit and loan balances. Wealth management client liabilities were $64 billion at quarter-end, an increase of $13 billion compared with the prior year quarter.

As far as compensation costs were concerned, they stood at $2.1 billion, down from $2.3 billion a year earlier; the year-ago quarter included compensation deferral cost adjustments of $88 million. If those adjustments are removed, compensation costs of $2.1 billion fell from $2.2 billion a year ago on lower revenues, the firm said.

Total client assets were $2.0 trillion and client assets in fee-based accounts were $795 billion at quarter-end. Fee-based asset flows for the quarter were $11.4 billion. Wealth management representatives of 15,889 produced average annualized revenue per representative of $947,000 in the quarter.

Across the whole group, the firm reported net revenues of $7.7 billion for the quarter, down from $7.8 billion a year ago. Results for the latest quarter included negative revenue related to changes in Morgan Stanley’s debt-related credit spreads and other credit factors, compared with positive revenue of $223 million a year ago.  

Full year net revenues were $35.2 billion compared with $34.3 billion a year ago.