Fact file

Goldman Sachs (Level 6)

Legal, finance and accounting

Overview

Goldman Sachs is one of the world's best-known investment banks. It advises companies and governments on big decisions such as buying other businesses, helps them raise money from investors, trades shares, bonds and currencies for large clients, and manages money for pension funds, insurers and wealthy individuals. Founded in New York in 1869, it is now a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and its main UK business, Goldman Sachs International, is run from its European headquarters in London.

Revenue: $58.28bn in net revenues in 2025, up 9% on 2024
Profit: $17.18bn in net earnings in 2025
People: 47,500 employees worldwide (30 September 2026)
Headquarters: 200 West Street, New York; European headquarters at Plumtree Court, London
Purpose: "We aspire to be the world's most exceptional financial institution," united by the values of partnership, client service, integrity and excellence

Why Goldman Sachs is interesting right now

2026 has been one of the strongest years in the firm's history. Goldman posted record quarterly net revenues of $20.3bn in the second quarter and record net revenues of $56.24bn for the first nine months of the year, helped by a boom in share trading and big deals, including reportedly leading the $75bn SpaceX share listing, the largest ever. At the same time, it is reshaping itself around artificial intelligence through a programme called OneGS 3.0, and it is finishing its exit from consumer banking by handing the Apple Card to JPMorgan Chase.

How Goldman Sachs is structured

The parent company is The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., which is owned by shareholders and trades under the ticker "GS". Since 2008 it has been a bank holding company, which means it is supervised by the US Federal Reserve, America's central bank.

In the UK, the main operating company is Goldman Sachs International (GSI). It is owned by Goldman Sachs Group UK Limited, which is in turn owned by the US parent. GSI is regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It carries out investment banking, trading in shares, bonds, currencies and commodities, and wealth management for clients across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Goldman was a private partnership for 130 years before listing on the stock market in 1999. It still names a small group of its most senior leaders "partners", and nearly 45% of its partners started at the firm as students or graduates.

Its biggest recent experiment was consumer banking. It bought the fintech lender GreenSky for $2.24bn in March 2022, then changed course in 2023, selling Marcus loans and later agreeing to hand over the Apple Card.

Leadership

David Solomon: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He became CEO in October 2018, succeeding Lloyd Blankfein.
John Waldron: President and Chief Operating Officer since 2018.
Denis Coleman: Chief Financial Officer.
Ericka Leslie: Chief Administrative Officer from May 2026, leading the rollout of OneGS 3.0.
David Viniar: Independent Lead Director of the board.
Anthony Gutman and Kunal Shah: Co-chief executives of Goldman Sachs International since January 2025.

In September 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported that the board had discussed John Waldron eventually succeeding Solomon. Goldman said there is "no definitive timeline for succession".

History and key milestones

1869: Marcus Goldman, a German immigrant, starts the business in a one-room basement office in New York, dealing in commercial paper (short-term loans to businesses).
1882: His son-in-law Samuel Sachs joins.
1906: Leads the stock market listings of Sears Roebuck and General Cigar.
1970: Opens its first overseas office, in London.
1979: John Whitehead writes the firm's 14 Business Principles, starting with "Our clients' interests always come first."
1981: Buys commodities trader J. Aron & Company.
1999: Goes public; its shares start trading on 4 May.
2001: Economist Jim O'Neill publishes "Building Better Global Economic BRICs", coining the term BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China).
2008: Becomes a bank holding company during the global financial crisis.
2010: Launches 10,000 Small Businesses in the UK.
2016: Launches Marcus, its consumer lending brand.
2018: David Solomon becomes CEO.
2019: Launches the Apple Card with Apple and moves into Plumtree Court in London.
2020: Settles investigations into the 1MDB scandal.
2021: Opens an office in Birmingham.
2025: Rolls out its GS AI Assistant firmwide and launches OneGS 3.0.
2026: Apple and JPMorgan Chase announce that Chase will take over the Apple Card (7 January); Goldman reports record quarterly revenue in July.

What Goldman Sachs does

Goldman reports three business segments. In 2025 their net revenues were:

Global Banking & Markets ($41.45bn): This is the classic investment bank. Its advisory team helps companies with mergers and acquisitions (M&A, when one company buys or combines with another). For example, Goldman advised on over $1.6 trillion of announced deals in 2025. Its underwriting team helps companies raise money by selling new shares or bonds. Its markets teams buy and sell financial products for big investors. In 2025 this included investment banking fees of $9.34bn, Equities (shares) revenue of $16.54bn and FICC (fixed income, currencies and commodities) revenue of $14.52bn.
Asset & Wealth Management ($16.68bn): Asset management means investing money on behalf of others, such as pension funds and insurers. Wealth management means looking after the money of very wealthy families. A growing area is alternatives, such as private equity and private credit (lending directly to companies rather than through banks or bond markets), where Goldman raised a record $115bn in 2025.
Platform Solutions ($151m): The remains of the consumer business, mainly the Apple Card. Revenue fell 93% in 2025 because of a $2.26bn reduction linked to handing the card to another issuer.

What the work actually looks like

Investment banking: Analysts build financial models, research industries and prepare pitch books (presentations for clients).
Sales and trading: Salespeople pitch ideas to investors such as pension funds, while traders buy and sell in fast-moving markets and manage the bank's risk.
Engineering: Software engineers build trading platforms, risk systems and AI tools.
Operations: Teams make sure trades settle correctly and client accounts are set up and checked properly.
Asset management: Analysts research companies and markets to decide where to invest.

Clients and sectors

Goldman works with large companies, governments, central banks, pension funds, insurers, hedge funds and wealthy families.

A real example from 2026 is SpaceX. Goldman was reported by CNBC to have been given the "lead left" role on the company's stock market listing, meaning it coordinated the deal. SpaceX raised $75bn when it listed on Nasdaq on 12 June 2026, the largest share listing in history, beating Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing.

Its Global Investment Research division covers more than 3,000 companies and other securities and over 45 economies. Well-known outputs include:

Top of Mind: a regular report on one big question. Recent issues have asked "AI in a bubble?" and, in June 2026, how worried we should be about an AI "job apocalypse".
BRICs (2001): one of the most famous economics papers ever written by a bank, which predicted the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Size and scale

Global net revenues: $56.24bn in the nine months to 30 September 2026
Return on equity: 15.0% (2025), a measure of profit made from shareholders' money
Employees worldwide: 47,400 (end of 2025)
Assets under supervision: $3.6 trillion (end of 2025); $4.1 trillion (30 September 2026)
UK company net revenues: Goldman Sachs International, $11.82bn (2025)
UK company profit: Goldman Sachs International, $2.83bn (2025)
UK company employees: 3,643 at Goldman Sachs International (end of 2025)
Birmingham: over 550 employees (October 2025), up from about 30 when it opened in 2021
Money returned to shareholders: $16.78bn in dividends and share buybacks (2025)

Purpose, values and culture

Goldman's four core values, in its own words:

Partnership: "We prioritize collaboration and believe in the strength of the collective." In practice, big deals bring together teams from across the firm.
Client Service: "We lead with a service mindset, working to earn our clients' trust and exceed their expectations." This goes back to the 1979 principle that clients' interests come first.
Integrity: "We hold ourselves accountable to the highest ethical standards." After the 1MDB scandal, this value carries extra weight.
Excellence: "We aspire to nothing less than excellence." Goldman has ranked first for M&A advice for 23 years in a row, according to its 2025 annual report.

What it's like to work there

Very competitive: Goldman's summer internship accepted fewer than 1 in 100 applicants in 2026, the third year running. About 2,500 interns came from more than 500 universities. The firm also received over 1.1 million applications from experienced hires in 2025.
A launchpad: More than 650 Goldman alumni hold C-suite (top executive) roles at other organisations.
Learning: The UK degree apprenticeship programme has run for around ten years. In 2025 Goldman pledged £1.5m through the apprenticeship levy transfer scheme to fund training at West Midlands businesses and charities.
Technology: In 2025 the GS AI Assistant, announced by Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti, was rolled out to all staff to help with coding, summarising documents and translation.
Awards: Euromoney named Goldman North America's best for sustainability in its 2026 private banking awards.

Strategy and recent news

Record results (2026): Second-quarter net revenues hit a record $20.3bn, up 39%. Equities revenue of $7.42bn was an all-time record for any bank. Third-quarter net revenues were $18.68bn, up 23%, with earnings per share of $17.01.
OneGS 3.0 and AI (October 2025): A memo from Solomon, Waldron and Coleman launched a plan to use AI to make the firm more efficient, starting with client onboarding, lending, vendor management and regulatory reporting. It warned of a "limited reduction in roles".
Leaving consumer banking (January 2026): Apple and JPMorgan Chase announced that Chase will become the Apple Card's issuer, with the switch expected to take about 24 months.
Growing asset management: Goldman completed its purchase of venture capital investor Industry Ventures (a deal worth up to $965m) in January 2026, and bought Innovator Capital Management, which it says puts it in the top 10 providers of active ETFs (funds that trade on a stock exchange like shares) worldwide.
Leadership changes (May 2026): Ericka Leslie became Chief Administrative Officer to drive OneGS 3.0, and new leaders joined the Management Committee.

Goldman Sachs's industry

Competitor comparison

Goldman's closest rival is Morgan Stanley, which made record net revenues of $70.6bn in 2025. Morgan Stanley is bigger mainly because of its huge wealth management business ($31.8bn of revenue). JPMorgan Chase is a much larger universal bank (one that also serves ordinary customers) and, by LSEG data, earned more investment banking fees than Goldman in 2025 ($10.1bn against $8.9bn). Goldman still led the global M&A tables in 2025.

Market conditions

Global M&A in 2025 was the second-busiest year on record after 2021, rising by about 40%. In 2026, rising stock markets and volatility linked to AI and conflict in the Middle East boosted trading, while giant listings such as SpaceX boosted share sales.

Regulation

As a bank holding company, Goldman faces the Federal Reserve's annual stress tests, which check whether a bank could survive a severe recession. Its stress capital buffer, an extra cushion of capital it must hold, is 3.4% and will stay in place until a new requirement takes effect in October 2027. In the UK, the PRA and FCA regulate Goldman Sachs International.

Case study: the 1MDB scandal

In 2012 and 2013 Goldman helped Malaysia's state investment fund 1MDB raise $6.5bn through bond sales, earning roughly $600m in fees. Large sums were later stolen from the fund. In July 2020 Goldman agreed a $3.9bn settlement with Malaysia. In October 2020 it agreed settlements of about $2.9bn with authorities in the US, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore, and its Malaysian subsidiary pleaded guilty to a US charge of conspiring to break anti-bribery law. Former bankers Tim Leissner and Roger Ng were jailed, and Goldman clawed back pay from its leaders. In 2026 Goldman agreed to pay $500m to settle a shareholder lawsuit over the affair, subject to court approval.

Ongoing challenges

Volatile income: Trading and deal fees can fall quickly when markets turn.
AI disruption: AI could change how banks work and affect jobs, while AI-linked market swings add risk.
Private credit concerns: The firm's 2025 annual report flagged worries about the fast-growing private credit market.
Succession: Investors are watching who will eventually replace David Solomon.

Goldman's 2025 annual report says it has gained 390 basis points (3.9 percentage points) of global banking and markets "wallet share" since 2019. Showing you understand that Goldman competes for a share of a global pool of fees is a strong commercial awareness point.

Sustainability and social impact

Sustainable finance: In 2019 Goldman set a goal to deliver $750bn of sustainable financing and investing by 2030, counted from January 2020. By 30 June 2025 it had reached about $675bn (around 90%), including $401bn for climate transition, and expects to hit the target several years early.
Net zero: In 2021 Goldman said it would align its financing with a net zero by 2050 pathway. It left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance in December 2024.
Operations: Goldman first fully offset the emissions from its operations and business travel in 2015, and aims to source 80% of its electricity from long-term renewable agreements.

Community

10,000 Small Businesses: $750m invested globally and more than 20,000 small businesses supported since 2010. In the UK, over 2,500 businesses have taken part, and the programme estimates its alumni support 82,000 jobs and £10.6bn of revenue.
10,000 Women: $150m invested to support women entrepreneurs in over 150 countries, reaching more than 320,000 women.
One Million Black Women: A $10bn investment commitment plus $100m of philanthropic funding.

Apprenticeships at Goldman Sachs (brief)

Goldman Sachs offers four-year degree apprenticeships in FICC and Equities, where apprentices study Applied Finance, and Engineering, where they study Digital and Technology Solutions, combining work with a fully funded degree. In October 2025 it launched a new Digital and Technology Solutions programme with the University of Warwick's WMG. Full details are on the Goldman Sachs careers website.

Commercial awareness topics

M&A boom: Goldman earns large advisory fees when deal activity rises, so a busy deals market directly lifts its profits.
AI adoption: OneGS 3.0 shows how AI could cut costs and change entry-level roles at banks.
Private markets: Investors are moving money into private equity and private credit, a key growth area for Asset & Wealth Management.
Bank regulation: Changes to stress tests and capital rules affect how much Goldman can lend, trade and pay to shareholders.
Geopolitics: Conflicts and trade tensions create market volatility, which can boost trading but hurt deal-making.
Retreat from consumer banking: The Apple Card exit shows the risks of moving away from a firm's core strengths.
IPO revival: Record listings such as SpaceX bring big fees for underwriters.

Interview talking points

Why Goldman Sachs?

"Goldman has been the number one M&A adviser for 23 years in a row, and in 2026 it was reported to have led SpaceX's listing, the largest in history. I want to learn in a firm that works on deals that shape whole industries, and the fact that nearly 45% of its partners started as students tells me it genuinely develops people from the start of their careers."

What do you know about our recent performance?

"Goldman made record net revenues of $56.24bn in the first nine months of 2026, after a record second quarter of $20.3bn. Equities was a standout, setting all-time records for any bank, and second-quarter investment banking fees were the highest since 2021. Platform Solutions is small now as the Apple Card moves to JPMorgan."

Why this industry?

"Finance connects money to the organisations that need it. SpaceX raised $75bn when it listed, while Goldman's 10,000 Small Businesses programme has supported more than 2,500 UK businesses. Finance drives growth at every scale."

What challenges does Goldman Sachs face?

"Its income depends heavily on markets and deal activity, which can fall quickly. It also has to manage the cost of leaving consumer banking, and to use AI through OneGS 3.0 without losing the talent that makes it successful."

Showing the values

"Integrity matters to me, and I've read about how Goldman responded to 1MDB, including the $2.9bn settlement and clawing back executive pay. It showed me why the firm puts so much emphasis on ethics, and I'd take that responsibility seriously, even as a junior."

Showing commercial awareness

"I noticed Goldman is growing in private markets, raising a record $115bn in alternatives in 2025 and buying Industry Ventures. With investors moving away from traditional funds, that seems like a smart way to earn steadier fee income alongside trading."

Good questions to ask your interviewer

How is OneGS 3.0 changing the day-to-day work of junior people in your team?
What separates apprentices who thrive here from those who find it hard?
How has the strength in equities trading this year affected your team's priorities?

Common misconceptions

"Goldman Sachs is a high street bank." It is not. Apart from the Apple Card, which is moving to JPMorgan, it serves companies, governments, institutions and wealthy clients.
"It's only for finance graduates." Engineering is one of its two degree apprenticeship programmes, where apprentices study Digital and Technology Solutions rather than finance.
"It's all about trading." Asset & Wealth Management made $16.68bn of revenue in 2025, nearly 30% of the total.

Quick facts

Founded: 1869, New York, by Marcus Goldman
Stock market listing: NYSE, 1999
CEO: David Solomon (since 2018)
Global net revenues: $58.28bn (2025)
Net earnings: $17.18bn (2025)
Employees: 47,500 (30 September 2026)
UK company: Goldman Sachs International
Assets under supervision: $4.1 trillion (30 September 2026)
M&A ranking: No. 1 globally for 23 consecutive years (2025)

Accuracy note

This fact file has been written using publicly available information from Goldman Sachs's official reports and announcements, and reputable news sources, and is intended to provide students with accurate, application-relevant insights into the organisation. Accurate as of October 2026.

When does Goldman Sachs (Level 6) open?

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