Who are Goldman Sachs's decision-makers?

David Solomon has been Chairman and CEO since 2018, succeeding Lloyd Blankfein after a long career culminating as co-head of Investment Banking. In January 2025, Goldman's board awarded Solomon an $80 million restricted stock grant vesting in January 2030 — his second retention package in roughly three years — to lock in his leadership through at least the end of the decade. Solomon's strategic priorities center on refocusing Goldman on institutional strengths: expanding AWM to 30%+ pretax margins, exiting consumer banking, and investing in technology platforms such as Marquee and the Legend open-source ecosystem. His total 2025 compensation of $47 million represented a 20% raise.

John Waldron, President and COO since 2018 and Board Director since February 2025, is Goldman's operational center of gravity and Solomon's most widely recognized potential successor. His own $80 million January 2025 retention award signals the board's commitment to leadership continuity. Waldron's 2025 total compensation exceeded Jamie Dimon's — a notable benchmark in Wall Street pay. CFO Denis Coleman, with a 2025 proxy compensation of approximately $25 million, oversees capital allocation and the firm's fortress-balance-sheet discipline. Marc Nachmann leads the $3.7T Asset & Wealth Management division, identified as the firm's primary long-term growth engine, and oversaw the April 2026 Innovator ETF acquisition.

The May 2026 Management Committee expansion brought key business leaders into formal governance roles: Stephan Feldgoise (Global Head of M&A), Joshua Schiffrin (Global Head of Risk for Global Banking & Markets), and Ericka Leslie in the newly elevated CAO role. Leslie's mandate centers on Goldman's OneGS 3.0 operating system transformation — a firmwide initiative to reduce internal friction and redeploy capacity toward growth investments.

Goldman Sachs purchasing authority is distributed across divisions, with significant centralized oversight from the CAO function and Firmwide Technology & Risk. For technology and data services, budget ownership sits within individual business division CIOs reporting to the Firmwide CIO. Global Banking & Markets and Asset & Wealth Management each have dedicated technology leadership at the Managing Director and Partner level who originate and champion vendor relationships.

For vendor contracts above approximately $1 million annually, Goldman's Vendor Risk Management (VRM) program requires multi-stakeholder sign-off including Legal, Compliance, Information Security, and Firmwide Procurement. The business division head (MD or Partner level) champions the purchase, but centralized procurement closes the deal. Expect 3–6 months minimum from initial conversation to signed contract for enterprise software or data solutions; compliance-heavy categories such as cloud infrastructure or data-sharing agreements can extend to 9–12 months. Warm introductions from existing Goldman relationships dramatically accelerate this timeline.

Budget cycles are annual, anchored to a January reset. Vendors who begin relationship-building in Q3–Q4 with the business-side champion — and simultaneously engage the VRM process early — achieve the highest conversion rates. The firm's strategic focus areas for vendor investment as of 2026 include cloud-native infrastructure (AWS-aligned), market and alternative data feeds, risk and regulatory technology, AI/ML tooling with financial-services compliance posture, and ETF data and distribution infrastructure (following the Innovator acquisition).

Goldman Sachs operates with a two-segment structure following its 2022 consolidation from three segments. Global Banking & Markets (GBM) encompasses investment banking advisory, equity and debt underwriting, FICC trading and financing, equities trading and prime brokerage, and the Marquee digital institutional platform. Asset & Wealth Management (AWM) encompasses institutional asset management, private equity and alternatives, private wealth management, private banking and lending, and — following the April 2026 Innovator acquisition — the firm's rapidly expanding active ETF business.

Below the C-suite, the 47-member Management Committee (as of May 2026) serves as the firm's senior leadership body, spanning divisional heads, regional leaders, and functional executives. Goldman maintains its iconic co-head management style for key business lines, ensuring succession depth. The firm's largest engineering and operations hubs outside New York are Bengaluru, India (the largest non-U.S. site) and Dallas, Texas (where a new $500 million campus is under construction to accommodate 5,000+ employees by 2028). Platform Solutions — Goldman's consumer/transaction banking segment — has been wound down and exited through 2024–2026, with no remaining material consumer business.

The OneGS 3.0 initiative under newly appointed CAO Ericka Leslie represents the current organizational priority: standardizing firmwide operating systems, eliminating redundancy, and freeing capital and bandwidth for AWM growth and technology investment.