Could so-called "banking as a service" become the hot new product in the financial industry? Ever the risk-taker, Goldman Sachs (GS -1.14%) is betting that the answer is yes. The storied financial services company just released software that effectively provides bolt-on banking products and services to companies that want to offer them to their clients.
In Goldman's words, its software empowers a nonbank enterprise to "Embed business bank account experiences within your own applications."
This type of offering falls under a broader category known as "transaction banking," which essentially means providing the wherewithal for companies to conduct a range of day-to-day transactions to keep their businesses running.
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Goldman officially launched its transaction banking products and services in June; to date, according to a report from CNBC, $28 billion in deposits have been created by more than 200 clients through these offerings. It wasn't clear how much the company has booked in revenue from the activity.
Citing figures from researcher Coalition, CNBC added that the top 10 transaction-banking specialists -- including big U.S. lenders such as Bank of America and Citigroup -- collectively drew $32 billion from transaction banking in 2019.
In recent times, Goldman has been pushing out of its original core competency of investment banking into other areas of finance. It is particularly eager to get into more-traditional and historically less-risky financial segments such as consumer banking.
In the CNBC article, Goldman's global head of transaction banking Hari Moorthy was quoted as saying of the new software: "There's this butterfly effect that will kick in after we roll this out. It allows us to acquire clients of our clients, allows us to seamlessly be integrated in the fabric of banking and corporates."
