Peeyush Nahar, Goldman Sachs’ global head of consumer business, is leaving the bank and will take on an advisory role, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Nahar, formerly Uber’s vice president of technology, was hired to lead Marcus in June 2021 — months after the consumer bank’s previous chief, Omer Ismail, and head of large partnerships, David Stark, left Goldman to join Walmart’s nascent fintech startup.
As it stands, Nahar’s departure comes a little more than a month after another executive, Swati Bhatia, who was listed as the head of Marcus and co-CEO of GreenSky, said she would retire from Goldman and serve as an advisory director.
Goldman launched a reorganization in October, splitting Marcus into two groups. The platform’s consumer-focused operations were placed under Goldman’s asset- and wealth-management unit, while a subset of Marcus’ business that deals with corporate clients went to Platform Solutions.
That segment, which also includes Apple Card and home-improvement lender GreenSky, has lost roughly $4 billion since the start of 2020.
Goldman executives have debated whether to publicly announce a 2025 target time frame for Platform Solutions to break even, people familiar with the discussions told Bloomberg. Further, the bank has considered pledging to bring losses to less than $1 billion this year, according to the wire service.
Conventional wisdom may indicate that if there were grand-scale announcements in the offing, they’d come at Goldman’s Feb. 28 investor day.
A spokesperson for Goldman declined to comment to Bloomberg.
Marcus had long been rumored as a prime target in Goldman’s wide-scale 3,200-employee cull, launched last month. Marcus’ Platform Services neighbor, GreenSky, however, has largely been spared in the mass layoff, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
As for the consumer bank’s future, Goldman may yet recruit a leader with expertise running large credit-card programs and could aim to grow its existing card partnerships with an eye toward break-even, one of Bloomberg’s sources said.
Marcus, however, has been no stranger to turnover. Within a year of Ismail and Stark’s departure, Marcus lost its head of product, head of point-of-sale financing, CFO and a key consumer wealth-management executive.
Goldman spokespeople at the time downplayed the departures, saying the bank “has serious momentum and a deep and growing bench of talent” and spotlighting Marcus’ leadership team in particular, adding, “We are very excited about the future of the consumer business.”
