Inside Marco’s Argentinian mission to turn Goldman Sachs into a tech powerhouse

• Marco Argenti will take over as Goldman’s sole chief information officer in October.
• He sat down with an insider about his vision to transform how the bank operates.
• It’s building on what it learned at Amazon Web Services and focusing on the developer experience.

In the year In late 2019, a few weeks after Marco Argenti joined Goldman Sachs as a partner and chief information officer, he called a meeting with two of the bank’s top technology leaders, Ilia Geisinski and Ate Lahtirinta.

Argenti comes to Goldman from the cloud computing division of the tech giant Amazon Web Services, where he spent six years, most recently in the role of vice president of technology. AWS, Amazon’s biggest profit maker since 2016, has grown so fast it’s created a buzz in the hallowed halls of 200 West Street. Some analysts estimate that it could eventually cost $3 trillion on its own.

The topic of the meeting was how Goldman could do a better job of serving its clients — but not the billionaire hedge fund managers and titans of corporate America that the bank traditionally serves. Argent Goldman was interested in hearing how it works with other companies, with engineers writing the code that powers the bank’s business.

In the year In early 2020, Argenti established a developer experience team and appointed Gaysinskiy, who oversees Goldman’s consumer engineering team, to lead it. The initiative seeks to bring all aspects of a Goldman Sachs engineer’s life under one roof, from hiring to how they collaborate, Gaysinskiy Insider said.

Launching a team focused solely on developer experience is a testament to the lengths Argentina and co-founder George Lee Goldman have gone to to establish tech fashion. Argentina is also a sign that Goldman is hedging its bets on growth opportunities for the bank’s businesses.

Banking has always been a communication business, but as technology has a big impact on society in general, Wall Street is forced to shake things up. Goldman, the financial tycoon, is now catering to investment professionals and billionaires from its bread-and-butter business — a seismic shift that marks Wall Street’s biggest tech experiment.

In October, Lee will move to lead the bank’s newly formed office of operational innovation, leaving Argentina as sole CIO. The move gives Argentina 12,000 engineers, a multibillion-dollar technology budget and license to develop its script: Goldman’s future clients write code, not just trade.

Goldman insiders say Argentina’s push to increase accountability and expand results among the firm’s engineering ranks is already working, but not everyone at the former firm has been able to adapt quickly enough, and technology workers have been lost in recent years.

However, Argentina is on a mission to transform its banking sector into a tech player and tap into the nexus of data flows.

“For the first time in Goldman’s history, a developer is our client,” Argenti said. “It’s never happened before.”

From the Apple II to the public cloud

In the year Born in 1967, Argenti grew up in La Spezia, a small town of about 100,000 people on Italy’s west coast near Cinque Terre. He came from humble beginnings; Although Argenti is fascinated by computers, his family doesn’t have one at home.

So he asked the owner of a local architecture studio to practice on an Apple II. After saving money from his summer job, Argenti had enough to buy his own Sinclair computer, which he described as “a very early 1980s thing” that might look like a calculator today.

“The world of software somehow resonated very much with my brain and the way my mind worked,” he said in an interview.

Argenti studied computer engineering at the University of Pisa, then helped lead a series of software, e-commerce and mobile companies in Canada and Italy.

He spent half a decade at Nokia before moving to AWS in 2013, eventually leading the developer experience team.

When Goldman approached him, Argenti didn’t think he would leave Seattle. “You generally refuse to take a phone call from Goldman Sachs,” joked the person who took the call.

But Argentina quickly won the opportunity to build something new. During his few years at AWS, he oversaw Amazon’s Internet-of-Things business, working with industrial and manufacturing companies such as Volkswagen and Philips.

“I was thinking, this job isn’t really about writing software — it’s really about rewriting or re-engineering businesses,” Argenti said. “You’re applying software concepts to business or physical things.”

It didn’t hurt that Goldman’s top leadership — CEO David Solomon and president John Waldron — seemed to buy into Argentina’s vision. “They’ve discovered that they need technology to remain the most competitive or one of the most competitive financial institutions,” Argenti said.

Goldman’s top execs saw this competitive advantage in action in 2014 when they launched a market-intelligence service called Goldman Marquee. Designed for Goldman’s institutional clients, the marquee is slated to adopt BlackRock Aladdin — a centralized data-streaming and risk-management tool that clients can use to tap into the company’s data collection. In the year At the 2019 AWS conference, just days after Argentinian joined Goldman, Salomon sounded more like a technology CEO than a finance executive, highlighting the power of Marke, which allows developers to access “scalable services” through Goldman’s APIs.

At another AWS event in Las Vegas, two years into Argentina’s tenure, Salomon announced the launch of Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data with AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. The product, a developer-friendly data-streaming service for the bank’s buy-side clients such as asset managers and hedge funds, again places it at the intersection of data flows.

Computers are the new customer.

Chris Churchman, a Goldman partner and head of marquee, said Argentina’s Amazon tenure resonated with Goldman’s top echelons of the company’s culture and leadership principles, such as customer engagement — and its ability to provide the bank’s engineering firm.

“The company has a very strong focus on customer centricity under Waldron and Solomon,” Churchman said. “Marco’s approach to working backwards from the customer, pioneered by Amazon, is a way for the engineering firm at Goldman to structure that customer centricity from an engineering perspective.”

The organization had the opportunity to build new relationships with technology leaders who will shape the bank’s future, Cherukman said. “We haven’t had the same depth of engagement or relationship with non-traditional people, who are in our customers who are building their own technology and their own data infrastructure,” he said.

Christian Boulu, senior research analyst at Autonomy Research, said that while it is difficult to measure the impact of technology initiatives such as Marke or Financial Cloud for Data on Goldman’s bottom line, new technologies can be a hallmark of Goldman’s takeover or takeover. Customers.

“Part of how Goldman has been able to capture market share is because it has better technology,” Bolu said. “If you think about how customers are going to use data, it’s going to slowly go from looking at a screen or calling someone and talking to a computer to another computer. If you’re not in that line, you’re going to lose your share.”

To a new Goldman culture

Argentina’s push to put developers front and center marks a cultural shift: the technologist wants to make the bank more like a tech company.

Much of the change he brought to Goldman can be attributed to Amazon’s engineering beliefs and affinity for narrative memorabilia. Then there is the Argentinian weekly meeting where the bank’s brightest and most technological minds – from engineering managing directors to technology colleagues – monitor the operational parameters of critical systems; Geisinski said it came from the Amazon.

Although Goldman was steeped in finance and market culture unlike those in Goldman’s upper echelons—or perhaps because of that—Argentina hit.

“Part of the reason Marco was hired was cultural,” Churchman said.

On a typical day at Goldman’s offices, Argenti is seen wearing a long-sleeve polo shirt rather than a suit. He says it’s disarming, which he doesn’t usually associate with senior financial executives.

Argent also plays guitar in the rock band Element 47 with his Seattle buddies. The band’s name is a play on the Argentinian’s last name, which means silver in Italian. Silver, Argent also represents the age of the band members. (“We’re not spring chickens,” he said.) The former lead singer has used his shows to raise money for pancreatic-cancer research, like one at East Village club Heaven’s Chain White in July. The disease.

Giving Argentina a Big Tech leadership style at one of the most powerful banks on Wall Street hasn’t always been easy.

Argentina’s new focus on developer experience comes as Goldman struggles to retain some of its engineering talent in its consumer and wealth management divisions. Between 2020 and 2021, its presence in the broader consumer-technology group reached 14%.

Six years after Marcus launched its consumer banking business, the division still faces high costs and questions about the viability of new products like robo-advisors and checking accounts in a crowded consumer-fintech market.

Argenti said the push to encourage developer experience across Goldman is focused on addressing the “edges” in the development of software products and tools. Chief among these is the “build” stage, the time-consuming process of converting characters to screen on a machine.

“This is generally a very frustrating time for developers, because they have to wait until the thing is built before they can actually test it,” he said, adding that the construction process is now very fast at Goldman.

While Argentina’s attention to detail and rigor might energize some, it’s not for everyone. Gaysinskiy said that Argentina’s approach took some getting used to in Goldman’s engineering standards. “The idea might make some people uncomfortable, because you have to go in and really defend the important details,” he said.

Argenti, for his part, says progress comes from promoting “healthy peer pressure” and continued collaboration.

“Such accountability is related to the concept of ownership,” he said. “The builders are the owners. So you use their ownership rights to make them accountable.”

In Churchman’s view, Argentina brings a new and long-term perspective to the growth of Goldman’s products. Churchman recalled going to Argentina for advice on whether to get a new marquee device to market or wait to iron out more kinks, and Argentina’s direct response.

Churchman said simply: ‘Nobody remembers that the iPhone was six months late. They just remember that it was a great product.