Dive Brief:
- Goldman Sachs named 60 new partners Thursday, the smallest group elevated in the bank's biennial promotions since 1998, a year before the bank went public.
- The class is more diverse than previous ones: 32 (or 53%) are White men, marking the slightest representation on record for that group, according to the Financial Times. Women make up 27% of new partners — just above the 26% representation women saw in 2018, the last year partners were added. About 17% of new partners were Asian, 7% were Black and 5% were Hispanic or Latino, the bank said.
- Goldman also aimed to name partners from a broader swath of its business units. Investment banking and trading historically had been overrepresented in classes of new partners. This year, they make up 66% of the list — a drop from 71% two years ago, the Financial Times reported.
Dive Insight:
Goldman partners receive a pay raise to a $950,000 base salary and exclusive perks — including the title alone, a vestige of the days when Goldman was Wall Street's last private bank and partners owned a stake. These days, the slice partners own is nominal, but the prestige is still a motivator.
CEO David Solomon has aimed to make it more so this year, giving partners new access to profits from the firm's private investment funds, in an effort to curb complaints about falling pay and a stagnant stock price.
Veteran partners had also reportedly groused that the circle — which grew from about 220 when the bank went public to more than 500 under former CEO Lloyd Blankfein — was getting too big, spreading the benefits too thinly and undercutting the exclusivity.
While the new partner list typically numbered 100 or so in the past decade, Solomon cut it to 69 in 2018, about a month after he took the bank's top role. Goldman now has fewer than 440 partners among its 38,000 employees, as a greater number than usual have left or been forced out in recent years.
Those who make partner typically stay at Goldman for another eight years, the bank said.
"I see this a bit like 'Special Forces' — the challenge is to become one, then you do it for a while and then you move on to do other fun stuff," one former partner, who left for a hedge fund six years after his promotion, told the Financial Times.
This year's mandate was to keep the list tight and emphasize several prongs: reward top producers, ensure diversity and plumb Goldman's growth businesses such as wealth management to show their importance, executives told The Wall Street Journal. As such, the list had more coders, but somewhat surprisingly, no one from digital banking, the publication reported.
