Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Goldman’s digital-only retail bank, is quickly becoming a full-service financial platform — a threat to both challenger banks and traditional incumbent players.
At an industry event in New York on Friday, the company’s chief operating officer John Waldron reportedly said the company currently is building out its online retail bank Marcus to include a digital wealth management product for a broad customer base.
“We are developing a digitally empowered mass affluent capability that will leverage our Marcus platform and customer base,” said Waldron. “We envision an advisor-led and digitally empowered offering tailored to clients across the spectrum of wealth.”
Waldron’s comments build on earlier indications of Marcus’s ambitious growth plans. Launched in 2016, the company, which has $46 billion in retail deposits in the U.S. and the U.K., is vying to become a multi-product banking platform that encompasses, deposits, lending and investing.
“We are building Marcus as a fully integrated digital business,” said Goldman’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, in a first-quarter earnings call in April. “As a broad multi-product platform, wealth management will be a key component. This is a very large market with $9 trillion in mass affluent customer assets across more than 20 million U.S. households.”
With the expansion of the Marcus platform, both incumbent banks and challengers need to ensure their digital banking and investment tools are sufficiently robust to stay competitive, said Aite Group research director Alois Pirker. Goldman is a well-resourced institution that has the benefit of considerable in-house expertise in investment management, he noted. While big banks like JPMorgan Chase have the capacity to go head-to-head with Goldman on its digital banking and investment product sets, others risk falling behind, he argued.
“[Marcus] is a serious competitor to both digital [retail banks], as well as the robo-advisers,” said Pirker. “Many banks are still relying on branches, so they will need to be careful not to miss out on the digital transformation that Goldman is showing.”






