JPMorgan, Apple, Goldman score a rare win-win-win

IF YOU CAN'T get what you want, get what you need.

- PAUL J DAVIES

It's taken the best part of two years, but JPMorgan Chase & Co. has finally helped Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Apple Inc do just that with the tech giant's credit card.It's a good result for all three firms - Goldman escapes its error-strewn foray into consumer finance, Apple gets a partnership with America's best run bank, and JPMorgan wins some useful growth in the form of a $ 20 billion book of card loans. The deal is far from risk free for JPMorgan, but it helps in the hunt for ways to put some of its roughly $60 billion of excess capital to work - no simple task for a lender already so dominant in the US.

For Goldman, the exit draws a line under an embarrassing chapter. It launched the credit card with Apple in 2019, the year after David Solomon took over as CEO. He wanted to build a set of consumer businesses to add more reliable revenue to the ups and downs of trading and doing deals. It proved a disaster, upsetting senior bankers and ultimately leading to more than $7 billion in pretax losses on several ill-fated deals since 2020, according to analysts at RBC Capital Markets.