Dear Readers,
I hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend.
I wanted a highlight a massive project across the Business Insider newsroom that just went live this past week: The 100 People Transforming the World of Business. It was the work of dozens of reporters, editors, and graphic designers, and it showcased outstanding individuals across industries including tech, finance, investing, retail, and healthcare, among many others.
If you’re new to the Wall Street Insider newsletter, you can sign up here.
Technology is quickly upending the finance industry in particular, and companies have no choice but to disrupt or be disrupted. Whether they’re banks like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs or nearly 300-year-old asset managers like Bank of New York Mellon, Wall Street firms are using tech like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and big data to transform their businesses.
They’re also competing head-to-head with smaller, nimbler startups in new areas like digital wealth management, payments, and lending.
You can check out our list of the 10 leaders across finance who are transforming Wall Street by offering new ways to trade, invest, buy homes, make payments, and provide deals advice.
Did we leave anyone out? Who else deserves to be on the list for next year?
Thanks for reading! Feedback is always welcome on our stories. Please reach out to me at ooran@businessinsider.com if you’d like a free Prime trial subscription.
Olivia
Richard Drew/AP
JPMorgan just handed its CFO a new role, and it could be a sign she’s a candidate to replace Jamie Dimon
JPMorgan shuffled management on Wednesday, taking the chief financial officer and placing her in charge of an expanded consumer lending business and taking the head of cards and making her CFO.
The bank said Marianne Lake, the CFO, would now be in charge of credit cards, autos, and mortgage lending. She’ll report to the consumer banking chief and copresident Gordon Smith, according to a statement. While Lake won’t be reporting to Jamie Dimon anymore, she will be getting on-the-ground experience running a business that is usually required to become CEO.
Goldman Sachs sees a major growth area in the ‘huge pool of money’ held by cemeteries as it looks to grow a $35 billion business
Goldman Sachs, which has long managed money for the country’s wealthiest people and companies, is looking further afield for new clients.
The firm started a business called Institutional Client Solutions in the consumer and investment management division in 2009 to manage money for nonprofit groups too small to do it themselves. The platform manages $35 billion on behalf of more than 500 endowments and foundations. These clients often include the groups that Goldman’s wealthy individual clients run, donate to, or otherwise advise: ballets, hospitals, and local nonprofits, among others.
The firm’s head of private wealth management in the Americas, John Mallory, said Goldman had started thinking even more creatively about potential ICS clients, which could include Native American reservations and cemeteries, to broaden its reach. The expansion comes as CEO David Solomon targets wealth management as a major growth area.
Citigroup is reevaluating its policy on testing job applicants for marijuana use as Wall Street banks weigh whether to work with the $75 billion cannabis industry
In a sign of the changing times, Citigroup is reevaluating its policy on screening job applicants for marijuana use as Wall Street banks weigh whether to work with the industry, a representative confirmed to Business Insider.
The person pointed to the changing social climate around marijuana legalization as the reason. Thirty-three states now have laws allowing some form of legal access to marijuana.
The New York City Council passed a bill last week that would bar employers in the city from forcing job applicants — outside "safety-sensitive" industries like law enforcement and construction — to take drug tests for marijuana use.
BlackRock says its Aladdin Wealth unit is helping it ‘be part of the infrastructure,’ and it could drive even more money to the world’s largest asset manager
Individual investors are so impressed by BlackRock’s risk-evaluation technology that they’re moving their money to the financial advisers who use it, the firm’s executives said on Tuesday’s earnings call.
BlackRock has been selling Aladdin, its signature investment management platform, to institutional investors, insurance companies, and other asset owners for 20 years. It’s a bright spot for the world’s largest asset manager, driving revenue within technology up 11% year-on-year, according to first-quarter earnings.
In recent years, the firm broadened the platform to wealth-management companies so that financial advisers, private bankers, and other personal money managers could model portfolio risk for their clients. The first such client started using Aladdin Wealth two years ago.
Bank of America’s equities-trading profits cratered, and its explanation may have revealed how much of a killing it made on a monster trade last year
Bank of America’s equities division saw first-quarter revenue fall 22% compared with last year.
That’s in part because of a monster trade the bank did in 2018 that boosted the unit’s baseline.
Insiders said the trade in question was most likely a complex derivative deal that helped a Chinese billionaire snag a $9 billion stake in the German automaker Daimler.
The "collar trade" brought in about $160 million in the first quarter of 2018, based on the figures quoted by bank executives on Tuesday, but the total could have been much higher.
In markets:
- The research chief at the world’s largest hedge fund unpacks a market that’s suddenly opening up to US investors — and why the gold rush is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
- The world’s largest hedge fund just warned that the ‘most pro-corporate environment in history’ is in danger — and said the fallout could send stocks plunging
- People frustrated with their taxes are piling a record amount of money into an exempt investment that looks unstoppable. Here’s how you can get involved.
In tech news:
- Mistrust, secret memos, and boardroom drama — inside the chaos at HQ Trivia after its young cofounder’s sudden death
- Here’s what Googlers and startups have to say about new Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s strategy, three months into his reign
- The new co-CEO of Salesforce explains how the $124 billion cloud company’s ‘fourth’ act is using AI to give its customers the ‘Holy Grail’
Other good stories from around the newsroom:
- ‘People will try to stop you’: Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier shares the inside story of how a janitor’s son rose to graduate from Harvard Law and lead the $210 billion US pharma giant Merck
- HuffPost is asking readers to voluntarily pay to support its journalism, even as its parent Verizon made $16 billion in profits last year
See Also:
- Bank of America beats, posting record quarter with $7.3 billion in profits
- BlackRock beats earnings expectations, as assets tick up
- Meet the most powerful Goldman Sachs banker you’ve never heard of; Silicon Valley has made top data-science talent too expensive for many hedge funds
Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Olivia Oran)