Goldman Sachs is on a hiring spree for the tech team at the heart of its new strategy
- Goldman Sachs is looking to hire 60 people for Marquee, an API store inspired by the firm's CFO Marty Chavez, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
- The company is scaling the platform, which gives Goldman clients access to data and analytics, in the hope that it can deepen business ties.
- The bank is hiring engineers "across the stack," according to two recent job ads.
- "We're packaging everything we do, and actually, we're redesigning the whole company, around APIs," Chavez said in 2017.
Goldman Sachs is looking to hire a slew of engineers as it builds out a new platform inspired by Silicon Valley.
The firm is looking to hire 60 staff for its Marquee platform, people familiar with the matter tell Business Insider. The brainchild of Marty Chavez, Goldman's chief financial officer, Marquee provides clients with access to the bank's analytics, data, content, and execution capabilities via a browser or an API.
Recently advertised engineering positions relating to Marquee say the company is scaling the platform "to a multitude of API calls which are used by clients across the globe."
"We are pursuing engineers across the stack," the ads say.
Goldman recently hired Reinaldo Aguiar, a former senior software engineer at Google who focused on the tech giant's search ranking, to build out the bank's Marquee platform, Business Insider first reported.
APIs are the standard way for computer programs to "talk" to one another without human intervention. When you use your Facebook account to log in to Spotify, that's Spotify talking to the Facebook login API. Famously, Jeff Bezos mandated several years ago that the only way Amazon teams could integrate their products would be via API, in a bid to increase the efficiency and speed at which programmers can build new services.
This model is based on taking in data, pushing it through analytics engines, then making it available to internal and external clients through Goldman Sachs' digital platform. Typically, sharing such information is common in Silicon Valley, but it has been unusual on Wall Street, where firms are more protective of their proprietary information.
"Historically, the API has been human beings talking to other human beings over the telephone, and all the tools, the content, the analytics is on the internal platform only," Chavez said in 2017. "We are shifting this radically and shifting this fast, and we're packaging everything we do, and actually, we're redesigning the whole company, around APIs."
The idea is that giving clients access to Goldman Sachs' data and analytics tools strengthens the bank's relationship with them, leading to additional business.
JPMorgan has followed Goldman's lead. It recently launched its own API store, allowing clients to plug into JPMorgan's data. The API store was highlighted by JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon in his annual letter to shareholders as part of a discussion of the bank's tech strategy.
With JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs now promoting their own API stores, a new front is emerging in the battle for business on Wall Street, with banks putting data and analytics tools in the hands of clients.
"It simplifies the way we work with our clients, but longer-term, it could actually transform the way we think about a product," Lori Beer, chief information officer for JPMorgan Chase, told Business Insider. "Again, the one thing that tech companies have traditionally done is leverage platforms. They've thought about how they deconstruct their core business capabilities, and that allows them to package them in a much different way."
Matt Turner contributed to this report.