Hari Moorthy leads Goldman Sachs technology based push into banking
Goldman Sachs began selling software which enables companies to set up digital banking operations as part of their cash management operations. Using the software, companies can automatically create virtual accounts, originate payments globally and track account balances, payments and transactions.
“We are trying to create a new industry,” Hari Moorthy, Partner, Global Head of Transaction Banking at Goldman Sachs told CNBC today. A technology company, he said, can use the software “to create a solution for payments or deposits in concert with whatever else they currently provide” to a client. “There’s this butterfly effect that will kick in after we roll (the software) out…It allows us to acquire clients of our clients…”
Goldman recently entered the cash management business, which is estimated to generate $32 billion in annual transaction fees to the banks which provide the service. Goldman faces strong competition from J.P. Morgan, Citibank and other large established commercial banks.
In 2018, Goldman re-hired Moorthy as a partner, from JP Morgan, to build cash management tools, deposit accounts and other product offerings for big companies. Moorthy led Goldman in creating the cash management software. The tool was first used internally and is now being offered to clients.
The leading investment bank in the U.S., Goldman provides advice to companies on mergers and acquisitions and capital raising. It is pursuing growth in asset management and recently entered the consumer and corporate banking business. It runs Marcus, an online consumer bank which offers personal loans, savings accounts and high-interest paying deposit products to consumers. Founded in 1869, Goldman has a market value of $66 billion.
Moorthy first joined Goldman’s in 2007, as global technology head of margin risk for its Global Securities Services Division. In 2014, while a Managing Director, he left to join JP Morgan. Earlier, he worked at CheckFree Services Corp., now part of Fiserv, and Netcom Systems. He started his career as a systems analyst at Imagine Technologies.
He is one of the rare Indians to climb the corporate ladder in the U.S. without an advanced degree from an American University. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, with honors in mathematics and engineering, from the Birla Institute of Technology & Sciences, Pilani. He holds six patents in financial technology, the latest from 2011.
Speaking about hiring interns for the technology department, Moorthy said Goldman looks for three skills: coding, analytical, and communication and leadership. Some of the interns are hired as employees, especially if they come up with unique solutions as a result of their two-month project, he told Business Insider.
In his Letter to My Younger Self, a 2019 blog post at Goldman, Moorthy lists the five pieces of advice he wished he had received early in his career: be mindful, deliberate and present; innovation is redefining a problem under constraints; surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and different from you; actively choose to be happy; and every day is a new opportunity - the 5 percent of successful attempts are the result of learning from the previous 95 percent of failures. Your failure is the insurance of your future success.
He adds, every single day, “When you are stuck after you have explored all possible solutions, just remember this one thing: you haven’t.”