Goldman executive who led consumer banking launch set to depart

Goldman executive who led consumer banking launch set to depart

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The Goldman Sachs executive who spearheaded its push into consumer banking is leaving, 10 months after he handed over day-to-day running of the business.

Harit Talwar will exit Goldman in October. The departure crystallises a transition to a new phase of leadership at its consumer business, one of the Wall Street investment bank’s biggest initiatives in decades.

Talwar, the former US cards boss at Discover, joined Goldman in 2015 as the first employee of what would become Marcus, its new consumer lendingbusiness. The goal was to find new sources of revenue by banking retail depositors and borrowers, diversifying from Goldman’s traditional client base of big institutions and rich individuals.

“We set out to build a fintech inside a 150-year-old investment bank. There were many sceptics, some frankly inside the firm and many more outside, about whether this could be done,” Talwar told the Financial Times.

Talwar led the launch of Marcus, named after the bank’s founder Marcus Goldman. Goldman has also partnered with other companies such as Apple to push financial products, including credit cards.

Marcus now has more than 2,000 staff, 8m customers, $100bn in deposits and almost