Goldman poaches Wells Fargo exec to lead transaction-banking unit

Dive Brief:

Goldman Sachs has hired away Wells Fargo executive Paul Camp to serve as its next head of transaction banking, according to a memo seen Monday by Reuters.
The move comes three months after Goldman fired its previous transaction-banking chief, Hari Moorthy, and three other employees, following a violation of the firm’s communication policy, according to the wire service.
Camp will report to Philip Berlinski, Goldman’s treasurer, whom the bank assigned in September to oversee the transaction-banking business alongside Akila Raman and Luc Teboul. Raman and Teboul will work closely with Camp, managing transaction banking day to day, according to Monday’s memo.

Dive Insight:

In Camp, Goldman gets a banking journeyman. He joined Wells Fargo in 2021 to lead a mashup of the bank’s treasury management and global payment solutions units. Before that, he served for three years as CEO of treasury services for BNY Mellon.

Camp began his banking career with Deutsche Bank in 1990 and worked for the German lender for 14 years in two stints, according to his LinkedIn profile. Camp also worked as global head of transaction services for JPMorgan Chase between 2011 and 2014, and served as an early CFO for the fintech Circle.

Camp inherits a transaction-banking business (TxB) that stands as a bright spot in Goldman’s Platform Solutions unit. TxB — which moves money around the world for large companies through services such as cash management and treasury — posted $233 million in revenue over the first nine months of 2023, Reuters reported.

Goldman, at its investor day in February, highlighted TxB’s profitability in contrast to much of the rest of Platform Solutions, a division the bank credited in January with more than $3 billion in losses since 2020. Platform Solutions also houses Goldman’s credit-card partnerships, home-improvement lender GreenSky and some business from consumer-banking platform Marcus.

But the bank is shedding some of these tie-ups: Goldman agreed in October to sell GreenSky to a consortium of investors led by private-equity firm Sixth Street. Days are also numbered for Goldman’s flagship credit-card partnership. Tech giant Apple last month sent a proposal aiming to wind down its ties with Goldman within the next 12 to 15 months.

Goldman reportedly dismissed Camp’s predecessor, Moorthy, when he did not comply with a policy that states employees must discuss business matters on firm-approved communication channels, then failed to cooperate with the bank’s compliance department, Reuters reported in September.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Goldman $200 million in September 2022 in a crackdown on corporate employees’ use of “off-channel” communications like WhatsApp for business purposes. The same regulators hit another 11 firms with a wave of similar penalties in August.

Goldman agreed to pay the CFTC a separate $5.5 million in August for failing to track staff mobile-phone calls and for breaching an order from November 2019.

A segment of Goldman’s transaction-banking business stopped accepting higher-risk clients after the Federal Reserve warned the lender of insufficient due diligence and monitoring processes involving its partnerships with fintechs, the Financial Times reported in August, citing people familiar with the matter. Some employees of the transaction banking division flagged Goldman’s tendency to minimize risks, sources told the publication at the time.