David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, jumped on a flight to go meet Reese Witherspoon.star-turned-mogul was toying with offering online financial services to her legions of fans, and the head of Wall Street’s most prestigious investment bank wanted in. He saw it as a potential new source of business for Marcus, his firm’s foray onto Main Street and handling money for the masses.
Chequing accounts, once widely expected to get a big rollout to the masses, will instead be steered toward well-to-do clients and employees at corporate partners. The same goes for the bank’s robo-adviser, known as Marcus Invest, and savings accounts. Folding Marcus’s direct-to-consumer products into wealth is a bet on what already works for Goldman. The firm has a workplace offering that it purchased almost 20 years ago called Ayco. It knows how to woo and deal with companies and can reach a targeted workforce at the roughly 500 companies it partners with.
Goldman shares have tumbled by more than a fifth in 2022. Solomon has struggled to persuade investors to re-rate the stock, despite preaching the virtues of diversified earnings and a shift away from what’s perceived as the unpredictability of trading and banking. At Goldman, pressure has been mounting on managers to tackle the consumer unit’s expenses. It became all the more acute this year, with analysts projecting profits will drop more than 40 per cent from last year’s record, prompting layoffs and reductions in bonuses.