Goldman Sachs' courting of outside developers just got serious.
One of Wall Street's biggest banks showed its eagerness to work with third-party developers by announcing plans to shift one of its highly touted platforms to the public cloud.
Goldman CEO David Solomon said on Tuesday that the Marquee platform — a set of tools allowing developers to tap into the bank's pricing feeds, analytics, and trading functions — would migrate to Amazon Web Services.
Speaking at an annual AWS conference in Las Vegas called AWS re:Invent, Solomon pitched the bank to the attendees, many of whom were AWS customers.
"We want to be your first choice to provide services that enable you to provide financial functionality directly into your applications and workflows," Solomon said. "We want to enable you to focus on building things that we couldn't dream of, things that change the way the world works for the better."
Goldman Sachs' efforts to attract outside developers has kicked into high gear in recent years. With Marquee, the bank can offer a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for customers to tap directly into for specific financial services they are looking to add to applications or tools.
In October, Goldman Sachs said Marquee was handling about 1 million requests a day and had 50,000 monthly active users, although that included internal inquiries.
In an exclusive interview with Business Insider in November, Goldman Sach's newly-minted chief technology officer, Atte Lahtiranta, said a key goal in his role would be to recruit outside developers to work more closely with the bank.
Moving Marquee to AWS speaks exactly to that desire. While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have made up ground recently, AWS remains the the most widely-used public cloud in the world.
And a recent top Goldman hire is no stranger to AWS. Marco Argenti, who served as vice president of technology at AWS since 2013, joined the bank in late October as a cochief information officer.
In the same way AWS represents a way for developers to access the computing power they need on demand, Solomon pitched Goldman Sachs as doing the same for financial tools.
"Our job will remain the same, to assume the burden of complexity and make finance as easy, intuitive and as effective as possible," Solomon said. "Finance is complex, but it should never be a drag on innovation."
Even Solomon's attendance at the event is indication of the bank's increased efforts to appeal to developers. In 2017, Roy Joseph, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, spoke at the event.
The bank doesn't have an exclusive deal with AWS, Solomon said, as it works with other cloud providers. However, AWS was the first public cloud the bank worked with, he said.
And while many Wall Street firms continues to consider how best to use the public cloud, and to what degree they feel comfortable doing so, Solomon made it clear the importance of the tech and AWS.
"My goal is for Goldman Sachs to lead the way in building financial services technology, and we are going to succeed, in no small part, doing the work we have done and continue to do with Amazon Web Services," he said.
