By David Carnevali and Mike Stone

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Evercore has hired veteran Morgan Stanley banker Seth Bergstein as a senior managing director to drive dealmaking in the global services sector, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Bergstein, who served as head of Morgan Stanley's global services group for about two decades, held the title of vice chairman of investment banking prior to his departure from the bank.

He started his career at the Wall Street bank in the late 1980s as a financial analyst and briefly joined Goldman Sachs in 1991 before returning to Morgan Stanley, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Bergstein's exit is the latest in a flurry of executive moves from large banks to boutique firms and comes at a time of a slowdown in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity that has forced Wall Street's biggest banks to cut thousands of investment banking jobs.

Global M&A volumes for the first half of 2023 fell 39% to $1.38 trillion, according to data from Dealogic.

In recent months, Evercore has hired more than half a dozen senior bankers from bigger investment banking rivals such as Goldman Sachs to boost its coverage in sectors such as technology and industrials.

In June, Evercore hired veteran technology banker Tammy Kiely and top aerospace & defense banker Michael Tarulli from Goldman. Earlier this month, it recruited Neil Wolitzer, a partner in real estate investment banking at Goldman, one of the sources said.

Meanwhile, PJT Partners Inc, the boutique investment bank led by Paul Taubman, has hired Brendan Panda, a prominent aerospace & defense dealmaker, from Evercore, the sources said. Panda worked on several notable transactions during his time at Evercore, including Aerojet Rocketdyne's $4.7 billion sale to L3Harris.

Panda will join PJT as a partner focused on the aerospace & defense sector, the sources said.

Evercore, PJT Partners and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

(Reporting by David Carnevali in New York; Editing by Sonali Paul)