Goldman Sachs Deepens Banking Partnership With Apple

Goldman Sachs is expanding its banking partnership with Apple, something other banks have resisted.

A Thursday (Dec. 22) report by The Wall Street Journal — citing unnamed sources — says that Apple has spent years asking big banks to let their customers view account balances on the Apple digital wallet.

However, those sources say, banks have turned the tech giant down, not wanting to let Apple take over the customer experience while the financial institutions simply provided infrastructure.

Goldman, the report said, has been different, continually expanding a relationship with iPhone maker. The company launched an Apple credit card years ago and is working on savings accounts for cardholders.

It is also handling some of the back-end services for Apple’s buy now, pay later offering, although as PYMNTS reported in June, Apple will handle the lending for the service on its own rather than using a banking partner.

Goldman, meanwhile, has been scaling back its own consumer banking business to focus on banking services to wealth-management customers.

Reports emerged earlier this month that the company was planning further cutbacks to the retail side of its business, considering cutting hundreds of positions from its consumer operations as well as ending personal loans through its retail banking platform, Marcus.

Meanwhile, the WSJ report notes that the partnership is happening amid an ongoing race to build a super app that offers banking, payment, and investing services, something Google and Meta have both tried to do without success.

“There’s absolutely an opportunity to reshape how people interact with financial institutions,” Bob O’Donnell, president at TECHnalysis Research, a market-research firm, told the Journal. “Everything is done on the phone, so why wouldn’t the financial management piece also happen on the phone?”

As PYMNTS noted recently, building a super app could be easier said than done. We made this observation after reports that Microsoft was building its own super app.

“While pursuing this makes strategic sense for Microsoft, an assemblage of messaging and online collaboration features does not a super app make, as consumers expect much more,” we wrote earlier this month.

So what do they expect? According to the study “Super Apps For The Super Connected,” a PayPal and PYMNTS collaboration, 25% of consumers showed high interest, with 40% of high-earning millennials “very” or “extremely” interested in a super app, as defined as “a centralized user interface through which they can manage their lives, from interacting with friends to banking and everything in between.”