FinTech News

Goldman Sachs Debuts Marcus App at Long Last

Back in 2016, Goldman Sachs revealed that it was launching an online bank named Marcus, which would offer high-yield savings, certificates of deposit (CDs), loans, and more. As observers have noted, the debut of Marcus marked a bid by Goldman to appeal to a wider and notably younger crowd than their other products. Yet it was only this week that one missing element from the Marcus banking experience officially arrived: a mobile app.

As the Associated Press reports, a Marcus bank app rolled out to the App Store in recent days. According to Goldman Sachs spokesperson Kristen Greco, the app had been a popular request among the bank’s users, leading developers at the company to spend “the better part of 2019” working on such an offering. Greco admitted that the lack of a mobile application was an issue, noting, “People expect a digital bank to have an app,” but she went on to explain, “We wanted to make sure we did it right.”

Previously Marcus customers could access their accounts via the bank’s website or view balances in the Goldman-owned Clarity Money, but the bank didn’t have a mobile application of its own. Speaking of Clarity Money — which Goldman acquired in 2018 — it was the engineers and developers behind that project that were tasked with creating the new application.

Marcus holds $55 billion deposits between customers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Currently the bank offers one of the higher interest rates on savings, sitting at 1.7% APY as of January 10th. When Marcus purchased Clarity Money, it also enabled that app’s users to “upgrade” their automated savings plans to a Marcus account in order to earn such interest.

This latest development with Marcus comes as Goldman continues to pursue a more diverse customer base. These efforts are especially evident in the bank’s partnership with Apple to launch the Apple Card last summer. Meanwhile Joe Duran of United Capital (another Goldman Sachs acquisition) recently revealed that the bank was planning to launch a robo-advisor platform sometime this year.

For a company that has been a top investor in FinTech ventures, it’s truly surprising that it took this long for a dedicated Marcus app to debut. Nevertheless, with the Clarity Money team spearheading the project, users can bet that the finished product will be sleek and intuitive. On Goldman’s side, they’re surely hoping that adding this missing piece to the Marcus puzzle will allow the online bank offering to grow and help them to reach customers they keep trying to court.