Goldman Names Nachmann Trading Co-Head as Chavez to Depart
Goldman Sachs Group enlisted another investment banker in the effort to revive its trading unit.
(Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. enlisted another investment banker in the effort to revive its trading unit.
Marc Nachmann was named co-head of the firm’s trading division, replacing Marty Chavez, who will leave the firm at the end of this year. Nachmann, a 25-year veteran of the firm, has been co-head of the investment banking business since 2017.
David Solomon, a former investment banker who rose to chief executive officer last year, has pushed to offer more lending to trading clients and rely on corporations rather than hedge funds in the effort to boost the trading business. That division has struggled amid a years-long industrywide slump and posted an 11% drop in revenue in the first half of this year.
Nachmann will lead the business with Jim Esposito and Ashok Varadhan. Esposito and Nachmann both previously ran the firm’s financing group within investment banking, which handles stock and bond offerings and is seen as a bridge between dealmakers and traders. Varadhan is the lone holdover from former CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s regime.
“Marc will bring his experience in investment banking, including as head of the global financing group, as we execute our strategy to grow our securities franchise with more of our corporate clients and expand our financing capabilities more broadly,” Solomon, President John Waldron and Chief Financial Officer Stephen Scherr wrote in a staff memo.
Chavez, 55, who previously served as the bank’s CFO and chief information officer, was moved to the trading role last year as part of Solomon’s initial executive shuffle as he rose to CEO.
Chavez joined Goldman in the J. Aron trading unit that produced Blankfein and many of his top deputies. After exiting to found a technology startup, he returned to the firm and rose along with Goldman Sachs’s efforts to remake itself as a technology company.
He was even seen by some as a dark-horse candidate to replace Blankfein before Solomon emerged as the heir apparent.
He continued the tech push in his latest role, overseeing a hiring spree and a build-out of Marquee, a trading and risk-management platform that the firm hopes will translate into a meaningful business line in its trading unit.
“He has been a passionate advocate for engineers throughout the firm, redefining our clients’ experience with software and data,” Solomon, Waldron and Scherr wrote in the memo.
He was also a public face for the firm as CFO and used his personal experiences as a gay, Latino executive to help drive diversity efforts at Goldman Sachs and across Wall Street.
Chavez will become a senior director, according to the memo, an advisory role the firm often gives to former executives. The Wall Street Journal reported Chavez’s departure earlier Tuesday.
“It’s going to be kids, freedom and sunshine for now, but I’m not going to retire on a beach,” he said in an interview. Chavez, who has a doctorate in medical-information sciences from Stanford University, said he eventually wants to explore how computer programming can help solve problems in medicine.
For now, his only firm commitment is teaching a spring course at Stanford’s business school. The tentative title: “How Software Ate Finance.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Sridhar Natarajan in New York at snatarajan15@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steve Dickson
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