How Goldman Sachs aims to dominate another corner of Wall Street

Goldman Sachs has long been considered the king of Wall Street dealmaking. Now, the bank is increasing its focus on another target: managing money for wealthy clients and institutions. Investment banking services, like underwriting initial public offerings (IPO) and advising mergers and acquisitions (M & A), have long been Goldman’s bread and butter. In fact, the firm was ranked No. 1 in overall global M & A activity for the first seven months of 2025, capturing 32% of market share among its financial peers, according to LSEG data. Most recently, Goldman has had its hand in a number of high-profile initial public offerings, too, such as Nvidia chips-for-rent company CoreWeave , trading platform eToro , and fintech company Chime. But management sees a big opportunity in its much-smaller asset and wealth management (AWM) division. Speaking to CNBC, Marc Nachmann, Goldman’s global head of asset and wealth management, said the company has a plan to grow this business — which includes portfolio construction, risk management, financial planning and other investment services — and challenge its banking peers in a less-crowded corner of Wall Street. “There’s still an opportunity to take market share and be a winner in this game,” he said. Indeed, Goldman’s not alone in this pursuit. Morgan Stanley , for example, has been working for years to hit its goal of $10 trillion in total client assets across its wealth and investment management division, which was set under former CEO James Gorman in 2022 and continues under current CEO Ted Pick. The push for Goldman would also help to further diversify the firm’s revenue streams. Investment banking makes up more than two-thirds of overall sales, but these incomes can be volatile and cyclical. That was last seen in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic caused a huge disruption to Wall Street dealmaking, which the industry is still recovering from. In contrast, revenue from asset and wealth management services are often fee-based and less impacted by short-term market fluctuations. In a wide-ranging interview with Nachmann, we also talked about Goldman’s generative artificial intelligence ambitions, the regulatory backdrop under President Donald Trump , and Wall Street’s push into alternative assets, which the White House wants to allow into retirement accounts. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. A lot of Wall Street is focused on Goldman as a play on the rebound in investment banking, but I’m interested in looking into growth and expansion in areas outside of the GBM division, specifically your asset and wealth management businesses. How does AWM complement Goldman’s overall business mix? Nachmann: When you take it back to the big picture, one of the things that has helped tell our story better is that in the beginning of 2023 we had our investor day at the end of February. We reorganized the way we report and manage ourselves into these two big areas, right? So, you have GBM and AWM. GBM is the combination of the trading business and the investment banking business. I’d say it’s the long-established businesses. Both of these businesses are pretty concentrated when you think about the key players. When you think about both trading and banking between Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan , and Morgan Stanley, that’s a huge percentage of the market. And we’ve been a leader there for a long time. I’d also say overall GBM is a capital-intensive business, too, right? So, it requires a good amount of balance sheet. I think it’s a good return business, but it has some cyclicality in it. So, you see the capital markets activity, IPO calendars going up and down, M & A volumes going up and down, and trading volumes up and down. That’s a big 70% of our revenue from there. When you look at AWM, generally speaking, we have fee revenues that are sticky, durable, and generally speaking, good secular growth with both asset management and wealth. There’s less cyclicality. So, now you have less cyclical, less capital-intensive, more durable, sticky revenues, but it’s much more fragmented. And it’s not the same thing where you don’t have a Goldman, JPMorgan or Morgan Stanley who owns a huge proportion. There’s still an opportunity to take market share and be a winner in this game. I think we really simplified the firm into these two buckets. And given that AWM has this underlying secular growth, as well as the opportunity to continue to build more market share, it’s the growth part of the firm. I say that with all due respect to my colleagues in GBM. They of course want to grow too, but I’m just saying in terms of long-term growth, it’s really on the AWM side. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon emphasized during the conference call that Goldman is “particularly focused on thinking about…