Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is exploring a sale of an investment-advisory business it bought four years ago, undoing another signature deal under Chief Executive Officer David Solomon’s ill-fated push to manage money for a broader set of customers.
The bank is looking to sell the personal financial management business, which oversees about $29 billion in assets and grew out of United Capital, a California-based registered investment adviser Goldman purchased for $750 million in 2019. The acquisition was part of Solomon’s plan to broaden the firm’s revenue beyond a traditional focus on ultra-wealthy individuals.
“We are currently evaluating alternatives for that business as we determine where to invest our resources and where we see the greatest opportunity,” the New York-based bank said in an emailed statement Monday.
While it’s a small part of Goldman’s wealth business, it symbolized the earlier effort by Solomon to expand the firm’s business lines which are now being unwound. The firm has more than 16,000 clients and $1 trillion of assets under supervision in its ultra-high-net-worth wealth-management unit. Goldman also has been pursuing a sale of GreenSky just over a year after taking over the lending business, another sign of how dramatically management has backtracked on its strategy.
The potential sale was reported earlier by publications including RIABiz.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.