Editor's note: This article comes from the public number "Voucher Industry Planet", Author @ Voucher Star Research.
In the past two years in many public occasions, people have heard that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has repeatedly stressed that the position of the top Wall Street investment bank is different from the past: “We are a technology company.â€
This sounds like a speech, full of routines. How can a financial institution have "tech-savvy"? What's more, this is a 100-year-old investment bank established in 1869.
However, if you look through the information of Goldman Sachs in recent years, you will find that this sentence is justified.
According to the latest annual report, Goldman Sachs had a total of 36,800 employees by the end of 2015, of which more than 9,000 were engineering lions and programs. We can here make a not very appropriate comparison - at the end of 2015, Facebook's total number of employees is 12691, excluding its operations and sales posts, Goldman Sachs has exceeded the world's largest social network in the absolute number of technical staff. network company.
It does not seem far-fetched to compare financial institutions with today’s technology giants on the same plane. In fact, they have had a direct competitive relationship. Many venture capital institutions and startups have complained that financial giants from Wall Street have harvested a lot of fruit from the scientific and technological community in recent years. The most direct way is to give them a high price. , digging away their technical team.
The introduction of a large number of technical talents reflects the transformation of the thinking of large financial institutions from "technical support business" to "technology leading business" in the context of financial technology. Among the thousands of Goldman Sachs technicians are platform engineers, technical engineering analysts, liquidity managers, compliance officers, and programmers involved in transaction optimization.
Why does Goldman Sachs prefer to use "technology companies" to advertise itself?
The answer is that the problem facing a global financial institution is that the financial services industry is adapting to changes in the times and undergoing a bottom-up transformation.
Over the past ten years, the S&P 500 Index has risen by 66.54%, and Goldman Sachs' share price performance has far outstripped the broader market. Rafferty Capital analyst Dick Bove pointed out in a report, "it is not difficult to find what happened in the past decade, the entire financial services industry has undergone a disruptive restructuring, and Goldman Sachs did not embark on this rhythm."
The so-called "subversive refactoring" is better, faster, and quicker from the perspective of customer needs. The deep integration of financial services and technology puts higher demands on the efficiency and security of basic financial services such as transactions, payments, custody, and settlement. Corresponding self-regulation also requires technology to cooperate. It is because of lack of technical guidance that it cannot maintain its high efficiency. Goldman Sachs' trading business has lost its original market share in the past few years.
Therefore, Goldman Sachs hopes to use technology to reshape the confidence of shareholders and customers in this century-old company.
When it comes to Goldman Sachs’ increasing emphasis on technology, one thing has to be mentioned: that it has invested in numerous technology startups.
After the financial crisis in 2008, Internet start-up companies began to accumulate power and broke out. Goldman Sachs led and participated in well-known Uber, Pinterest, Dropbox and more than a dozen star companies. The figure below is the “Unicorn Company†investor of CB insights in 2015. The listed companies have valuations of more than US$1 billion. Four of the top eight institutional investors are Wall Street investment banks, and Goldman Sachs occupies them. a seat.
Unicorn Business Investors (CB insights)
Goldman Sachs released a research report at the end of 2015 that analyzed the changes in the seats of the world’s largest companies over the past decade by market capitalization. In 2015, the famous oil company, Eckson Mobil, was among the top performers. The top three global market capitalization companies were Apple, Alphabet (Google parent company) and Microsoft’s three technology companies.
Top Ten Corporate Change (GS) in Global Market Value 2005-2015
Today, the market share of US stocks technology companies has reached more than 20% of the market, close to the level of the tech bubble in 2000. However, the performance of these companies has shown unprecedented stability and growth potential, which may also be the so-called " Another side of disruptive refactoring.