Sources: Goldman Sachs' Platform Solutions lost ~$2B in 2022, mostly due to the Apple Card and Goldman's installment-lending platform GreenSky
including Goldman's Apple Card — now packaged into the segment dubbed Platform Solutions racked up more than $1.2 billion in pretax losses in last year's first nine months, with the drop accelerating every quarter. $GS https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The loss figure is the bill for a bet Goldman made at the top of the fintech cycle: the ~$2.24B all-stock acquisition of GreenSky in September 2021, followed by scaling the Apple Card program into a segment now reporting as Platform Solutions. Bloomberg's numbers show the losses accelerating quarter by quarter through 2022, with more than $1.2B of pretax losses in just the first nine months.
What came after confirms this was the inflection point: by late 2023 Goldman was shopping both assets, first selling GreenSky to a group of money managers at an undisclosed sum well below its purchase price, then seeking an exit from the Apple partnership entirely — a search that ended years later with JPMorgan replacing Goldman as Apple Card issuer.
First-order effects
- Goldman's consumer-finance expansion is directly on the hook: the segment housing Apple Card and GreenSky burned roughly $2B in 2022, pressuring management to unwind deals struck only a year or two earlier.
Second-order effects
- Prospective buyers priced the damage in — Amex balked at the Apple Card's loss rate during takeover talks, and Goldman ultimately had to accept an undisclosed, presumably discounted sum for GreenSky rather than recoup its $1.7B+ outlay.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-bank issuance of big-tech co-branded credit products gets repriced: issuers will demand economics that reflect real loss rates, and consumer-lending losses buried inside broad segments face closer investor scrutiny.
The trend: Wall Street is retreating from consumer-fintech partnerships with tech giants, as co-branded lending losses force banks to unwind acquisitions and hand marquee programs like the Apple Card to more conservative issuers.