The Oklahoman

Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs moves quietly into Main Street

- BY KEN SWEET

NEW YORK — More homeowner, less hedge fund titan. Goldman Sachs, long known for its superrich clients and well-connected executives, is starting to act a lot more like a neighborho­od bank.

The most Wall Street of Wall Street firms really wants people to start thinking about it the next time they need to open a bank account or borrow money. It’s paying above-average rates on online savings accounts and offering that stodgiest of investment­s, good old-fashioned CDs. Personal loans are available through its Marcus brand, a friendlier reference to co-founder Marcus Goldman.

For a firm that never had a reason to advertise, Goldman now runs Marcus commercial­s with the casual tagline: “Debt happens.”

During most of its nearly 148-year history, the main way to do business with Goldman was to be incredibly wealthy or a CEO at a major company. That’s changing.

“We want to grow a robust consumer banking business,” said Stephen Scherr, Goldman’s chief strategy officer and CEO of GS Bank.

Goldman’s retail banking business is less than two years old and tiny compared to the overall size of the firm. The company hasn’t yet even broken it out as a business line in its quarterly financial statements because of its size.

And Goldman isn’t backing away from its traditiona­l strengths: trading and advising.

Trading is inherently a volatile business, and a quiet market weighed on Goldman’s secondquar­ter results posted Tuesday. It earned $1.63 billion, or $3.95 a share, basically unchanged from a year earlier. The division that contains its trading desks had revenue of $3.05 billion, down 17 percent. Fixed income, currency and commodity trading revenue fell 40 percent, and Chief Financial Officer Martin Chavez said its commoditie­s division had its worst quarter since the firm went public in 1999.

Goldman executives see the new consumer banking division as a way for the firm to expand into businesses it traditiona­lly wasn’t involved in. But how well Goldman’s brand and image might appeal in the consumer business remains to be seen.

“I had a few readers tell me that they had no intention to do business with Goldman, but those comments were pretty limited,” said Ken Tumin with DepositAcc­ounts. com, a review site for savings accounts and other bank products.

Products offered

The consumer products Goldman is offering are pretty convention­al. An online savings account with its GS Bank requires no minimum opening deposit and pays an interest rate of 1.20 percent. Looking for longer-term savings? Goldman offers CDs with terms from six months to six years, paying as much as 2.30 percent. And fixed-rate, no-fee personal loans are available through Marcus by Goldman Sachs.

 ?? [AP FILE PHOTO] ?? A screen at a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is juxtaposed with the Goldman Sachs booth.
[AP FILE PHOTO] A screen at a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is juxtaposed with the Goldman Sachs booth.

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