Jane Wheeler wanted to put things in proper scale. That's why she's returning to the world of boutique investment banking. "A boutique is the best platform from which to conduct an advisory business," maintains the 36-year-old New York native, who quit Morgan Stanley in July to join Evercore Partners, the M&A shop started in 1996 by Roger Altman, the former Lehman Brothers star banker and deputy Treasury secretary.

Wheeler, who spent two years at London boutique Hambro Magan before moving to Morgan Stanley in New York in 1993, has counseled financial services companies' CEOs on a host of deals. Among them: electronic stock-trading network Instinet Group's sale in April to the Nasdaq Stock Market and online bond-trading system TradeWeb's sale last year to Thomson Financial.

But she may become better known for a deal she pulled off at Evercore two weeks after she arrived: On August 8 one of her longtime clients, E*Trade Financial, agreed to pay $700 million to acquire Harris Direct, a rival in the online brokerage business. Wheeler was E*Trade's sole financial adviser on the deal. And she believes that moving to Evercore will help her keep the deals coming.

"Corporate boards are more focused than ever on conflicts of interest, and there's a growing trend toward seeking independent advice," she says.

For Morgan Stanley the E*Trade transaction is one more piece of business that it has lost in recent weeks since the exit of some top bankers. The firm's former investment banking chairman, Joe Perella, who left in April amid the boardroom turmoil that ultimately led to CEO Phil Purcell's stepping aside, later advised credit card issuer MBNA on its $35 billion sale to Bank of America.

To Wheeler -- who stresses that the chaos at her old firm was not the reason she left -- the MBNA-BofA deal is evidence you don't need to be with a big firm to land big deals.

"He doesn't even have a company," she says of Perella. "If you're looking for evidence that advice is still a relationship-driven business that has not been commoditized like a lot of Wall Street's other businesses, that's it."