Goldman Shakes Up $1.7 Trillion Unit With Slew of Changes at Top

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is promoting Luke Sarsfield to co-head of its asset-management business, part of a raft of changes atop the $1.7 trillion unit.

Chief Executive Officer David Solomon is set to unveil a series of leadership changes in asset management, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The moves represent the broadest shake-up in the unit since the New York-based firm fused its investment-management arm with its merchant bank into a combined operation in 2020.

The promotion of Sarsfield, 48, elevates him alongside Julian Salisbury and puts an end to an anomaly atop one of the firm’s key units. Salisbury, the British accountant-turned-investor, had sole charge over the business for much of last year. That was an oddity at Goldman Sachs, which typically gives at least two executives the task of running key money-making operations.

The other changes include anointing new leaders for its alternative-investments business as well as the public-investing group, and creating new key sales roles with an expanded remit across the division.

Goldman Sachs restructured its business lines in 2020, and the combined investment-management and merchant-banking unit posted almost $15 billion in revenue last year. The firm had, for several months, left the role alongside Salisbury vacant after previous co-head Eric Lane announced his departure in March.

The asset-management group is of critical importance to Goldman, generating more revenue and profitability than even its vaunted investment-banking group last year.

Sarsfield spent about 20 years as a dealmaker, including various leadership roles in that group, before being tapped to run sales for asset management in 2019. In that role, he was responsible for cultivating ties with the firm’s institutional and retail clients.

Ashish Shah will now lead the public-investing arm, the business that includes the bank’s own mutual funds for a range of clients to plow money into the fixed-income and stock markets.

Shah, a soft-spoken fixture in credit markets jumped to Goldman from AllianceBernstein Holding LP in 2018, and his new role marks one of the most prominent perches at the firm for a recent transplant from a competitor.

The bank plans to hand over reins for its alternatives business to Mike Koester and Greg Olafson. The duo will lead a unit that is effectively a mini Blackstone Inc. inside Goldman and a key area of focus under Solomon. The firm is trying to raise more outside capital and cut back investing from its own balance sheet.

Goldman’s willingness to use its balance sheet in investing has also been the source of outsize profits from the business in boom years, but is viewed more skeptically by shareholders who have favored businesses that are less volatile and offer recurring revenue that’s more consistent.

Among the management changes:

• Chris Kojima and Heather Miner will lead a newly created sales effort across the asset-management unit that caters to everyone from individual investors to sovereign-wealth funds. Miner, who previously helped run operations for the division, will now be in charge of a revenue-producing role, which positions her for titles of more prominence within the firm.

• Katie Koch is being given oversight of the quant-focused group, replacing Armen Avanessians, who is one of the longest-serving partners at Goldman and will leave the firm. Avanessians is part of a vanishing breed of executives at the firm who made partner before the firm went public.

• Craig Russell, who helped lead a key sales role, will be moved to vice chair, an amorphous title at the firm that indicates the handing off of management responsibilities.

With the promotion of Sarsfield, Solomon will have installed at least one executive from investment banking, the division he used to run, in a leadership role at each of Goldman’s four business lines.

Sridhar Natarajan reports for Bloomberg News.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.