Goldman Sachs said its digital bank attracted more than £5bn just three months into its UK launch, after “hitting a nerve” with British savers.
The US investment giant debuted its online lending and deposit platform, Marcus, in the UK at the end of last summer, and pulled in 100,000 customers and £5.4bn in the final quarter of the year.
It added the account’s 1.5 per cent savings rate, one of the highest in the UK, led to greater demand than the bank had forecast.
"In the UK, we opened up to be perfectly candid with much more demand than we had anticipated and that will give us an ability to moderate the acceleration of rate,” said Goldman Sach chief financial officer Stephen Scher on a conference call, at the bank’s full-year earnings last week.
Scher added: "We were the beneficiaries of hitting a nerve in the UK market where we were paying more than the high street banks and deposits came our way, but the influx of that will give us more maneuverability on the rate."
In total, Marcus pulled in $35bn from savers in the UK and US in 2018, which has seen the account available in America for the past two years.
Overall, Goldman Sachs said its profit almost doubled to $10.5bn for the full-year to the end of December, beating expectations, as gains from advisory fees in the early part of the year, outweighed falls in its fixed income division due to turbulent trading in the final three months of 2018.
