After 147 years of existence, Goldman Sachs hangs a shingle on Wall Street

June 19: You used to need $10 million to become a customer of Goldman Sachs. Now you can get in with a dollar.

At a time when many storied firms on Wall Street are asking themselves profound questions — such as, What does it mean to be a Wall Street firminthisdayandage?—one of themosteliteinstitutionsin the business is opening an oldfashioned, deposit-taking bank catering to the little saver.

And while new accounts do notcomewithfreetoasters,GS Bank, started in April, does promise “peace-of-mind savings” and “no transaction fees.”

In short, it is aimed squarely at ordinary Americans — a clientele the company scrupulously avoided during the first 147 years of its history, favoring instead tycoons and plutocrats.

Itisthecrystallisationof an extraordinary moment in the halls of American finance. Goldman, like other marquee banking companies, is hunting for new business as its traditional ones falter. Regulations rolled out since the 2008 financial crisis have put a crimp in deal-making, Wall Street’s traditional expertise. The high-powered bond trading desks that generated most of Goldman’spre-crisisprofits now make only a fraction of what they did before.

Over the last year, Goldman executives have been preparing to introduce 401(k) accounts, loans for people saddled with credit card debt and newinvestmentfundsthatcan be purchased by anyone with an E-Trade account. It will all be online only. In fact, Goldman thinks one of its advantages will be that it does not have the historical baggage — read, expense — of traditional branches and tellers.

All of this has prompted some head-scratching in the industry, given that Goldman has so little experience in the hotly competitive field of retail banking. Not least among thechallenges:GettingAmericans to warm to a bank that hasbeenmalignedasasymbol of WallStreetgreedduringthe 2008 crisis.

At least one new customer dismissed that worry. “Of course they get blamed for stuff,” said Daniel Sigal, a 24year-old college student in the Los Angeles area who calls himself a Wall Street hopeful. But “Goldman Sachs is the Nike of finance,” he said — a brand everyone knows.

Its foray into banking is “very, very positive,” he said.

He also liked the 1.05% interestrateonsavingsaccounts that Goldman offered, which dwarfed the 0.01% he was getting from Wells Fargo. The average is 0.54%, according to Bankrate.com. Goldman will have to pull in many people like Sigal to make even a tiny difference in its annual revenue, which tends to be measured in the tens of billions of dollars. NYT