Goldman Sachs' big bet on the future of Wall Street had a rocky start. Here's the inside story of the bank's struggle to grow its next business
Goldman Sachs had a problem.
It was early 2017, and Marquee, a trading and risk-management platform in which the firm had invested millions with the hopes of turning it into its next big business, was struggling to gain momentum.
The platform was going to be Goldman's answer to a finance industry hamstrung by post-crisis regulations. The firm would give away valuable intellectual property as part of a technology strategy meant to position it, once again, at the nexus of global trading flows.
But inside Goldman Sachs, the outlook was less rosy. Engineers were stretched thin. Colleagues weren't selling it to clients as they should, worried about rushing out a half-baked product or sharing contacts with other areas of the bank, according to current and former executives. Some openly chafed against giving away the firm's secret sauce. And most worryingly, customers weren't embracing it to execute trades.
This story charts the growing pains of Marquee and explains how Goldman thinks it can one day serve as the pipes underpinning dozens of Wall Street startups or external-trading platforms. Business Insider also got the first look at the project's latest incarnation, a rebooted approach that takes it from a collection of roughly three dozen applications into something much larger and more ambitious.