A candidate who goes looking for a Goldman Sachs Asset Management application will not find one. There is a New Analyst Program, one form, covering the whole firm, and a candidate ranks Asset Management as one of up to three division preferences inside it, alongside Investment Banking and Global Markets. Nobody who lands the job applied to Goldman Sachs Asset Management specifically. They applied to Goldman Sachs, and the firm decided, later, which door to open.
Goldman Sachs Asset Management, by the numbers
| Formed | 16 September 1988, inside The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. |
| Why | To build fee-based revenue that would not swing with the market, months after the 1987 crash |
| Sits inside | Asset & Wealth Management (AWM), alongside Private Wealth Management, Private Banking, Ayco and Marcus |
| Global head of AWM | Marc Nachmann, on the Management Committee since the AWM franchise was built out |
| Assets under supervision (Asset Management alone) | More than $3 trillion, per Goldman's own figure dated to the end of 2024 |
| Assets under supervision (whole AWM division) | $4.041 trillion at 30 June 2026, up from $3.293 trillion a year earlier |
| Application | One firm-wide New Analyst Program; Asset Management is a ranked division preference, not a separate form |
| First interview | A roughly 30-minute video interview; a HackerRank assessment for engineering applicants |
| Final stage | A Superday, typically two to five interviews depending on the division |
That table is the skeleton. What follows is why the business exists at all, what it has spent the last several years turning itself into, who runs it now, and what the shared application above genuinely asks of a candidate.
Three figures for the same business, and what each one means
Ask how big Goldman Sachs Asset Management is and the honest answer depends on which Goldman-owned page happens to be open, because the firm has not gone back to reconcile them.
| Where the figure lives | What it says | Dated |
|---|---|---|
| Careers page for Asset Management | More than $2 trillion in assets under supervision | 31 March 2021 |
| Corporate "Our Businesses" page, Asset Management line | More than $3 trillion in assets under supervision | Fiscal year end 2024 |
| Whole Asset & Wealth Management division, latest earnings | $4.041 trillion in assets under supervision | 30 June 2026 |
None of the three figures is wrong for the day it describes, and none of the pages is being dishonest. They simply update on different schedules, and the oldest one, on the page a candidate is most likely to actually read, has not moved in more than five years.
The lesson is not that Goldman hides its scale. It is that a candidate should treat any AUM figure quoted on a careers page as a snapshot, never as current, and go looking for the dated version before repeating it in an interview.
A memo written to survive a crash, not to chase one
Goldman Sachs Asset Management exists because of a single afternoon in 1987. On 16 September 1988, the firm's Management Committee sent a memorandum to every employee announcing a new division built around fixed-income separate account management for pension funds and institutions, and around growing the firm's money market mutual funds, which then held roughly $11 billion.
The stated reason was not growth for its own sake. Goldman wanted recurring, fee-based revenue specifically because Black Monday, the October 1987 crash, had just shown how violently the rest of the firm's profits could swing.
That is a different origin story from most of the names in this vertical. BlackRock and Vanguard were built from scratch as asset managers. Goldman built its asset management arm as ballast, deliberately, inside a firm whose other businesses were already large and already volatile.
Two earlier failures the firm doesn't advertise
Goldman had tried this before and failed twice, and its own corporate history is candid about both. The Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation collapsed after the 1929 crash, barely a year after it launched, and it took decades for the firm's reputation in the space to recover.
A second attempt, a 1970s joint venture with Kleinwort Benson called Kleinwort Benson McCowan, went nowhere either. GSAM in 1988 was a third try, built smaller and more deliberately than either of its predecessors, and it is the one that stuck.
From a fixed-income sideline to a firm-wide engine
The division grew by acquisition as much as by organic build-out. In 1997, GSAM bought Commodities Corporation, a Princeton firm founded in 1969 that Goldman's own history calls "a trailblazer in the alternative investment space," adding $1.8 billion in assets and a roster of hedge fund managers Goldman could now offer clients access to.
In July 1999, shortly after Goldman's own IPO, GSAM and the firm's Private Wealth Management group were folded into one Investment Management Division, so the strategies built for institutions could reach high-net-worth clients through the same engine. By 2018, the combined business oversaw more than $1.5 trillion and had picked up industry awards for both its emerging-markets and alternatives work.
Test yourself
Warm-upWhat reason did Goldman Sachs give for creating a dedicated asset management division in September 1988?
Every milestone, in order
A fund history is the most durable thing about any asset manager, and Goldman's reads less like a straight growth line than a series of deliberate remakes.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1988 | GSAM founded inside Goldman Sachs, built around fixed income and money market funds |
| 1997 | Commodities Corporation acquired, adding hedge fund access and $1.8bn in assets |
| 1999 | GSAM merged with Private Wealth Management into one Investment Management Division |
| 2018 | Combined business passes $1.5 trillion in client assets |
| 2020 | First Investor Day; the outside-client growth and balance-sheet remix plan set out |
| 2023 | Julian Salisbury departs for Sixth Street; Marc Nachmann consolidates AWM leadership |
| Jan 2026 | Seven AWM partners named to the Management Committee in one announcement |
| Apr 2026 | Innovator Capital Management acquisition completed, adding 171 ETFs |
Read across the table and the pattern is not one business steadily getting bigger. It is the same division rebuilt at least three times, once by acquisition, once by merging with wealth management, and once by deliberately shrinking the part of itself that used to define it.
What Goldman Sachs Asset Management is now
Strip away the size and the division is really six businesses sharing one name, spanning both public markets and the kind of private deals most people associate with a buyout shop rather than a bank's asset manager.
| Business line | What it does |
|---|---|
| Equity | Fundamental and quantitative strategies across developed and emerging markets |
| Fixed Income | Currencies and public credit, single-sector, multi-sector and regional strategies |
| Liquidity Solutions | Highly liquid, short-term investments, largely government instruments |
| Alternatives | Private equity, growth equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure and hedge funds |
| Multi-Asset Solutions | Custom portfolios spanning equities, bonds and alternatives for a single mandate |
| External Investing Group | Investing Goldman's own capital into other leading asset managers outside the firm |
That last line is the one most candidates never expect. The External Investing Group exists to put Goldman's money behind other managers, traditional and alternative alike, and a fair number of the firms it backs compete with Goldman for the same institutional mandates. It is a smaller, quieter echo of a pattern that shows up elsewhere in this vertical: a firm that ends up funding, or servicing, the very rivals it is trying to beat.
Alternatives is where the growth is concentrated
Of the six lines above, Alternatives is carrying the most weight in the firm's own growth story. Goldman describes itself as one of the largest investors in alternatives globally, with decades of experience across private equity, growth, credit, infrastructure, real estate and secondaries, and it raised a record amount of alternatives capital in 2025 alone.
Private credit in particular has become a business Goldman talks about as a genuine source of deal financing rather than a side strategy, with fresh vehicles closing well past their original targets.
Test yourself
Warm-upWhat does Goldman Sachs Asset Management's External Investing Group actually do?
What a first year looks like, by business line
Almost nobody explains what the daily job differs by before a candidate accepts an offer, and inside a division built from six different businesses, the honest answer depends heavily on which one a graduate lands in.
- Equity or Fixed Income. Close to a traditional research seat: building models, covering a sector or a slice of the credit market, and gradually earning the right to defend a view to a portfolio manager.
- Liquidity Solutions. Closer to operations and product than to stock-picking, focused on managing short-term, highly liquid portfolios where precision and cost matter more than conviction.
- Alternatives. Deal-facing work on private equity, credit, real estate or infrastructure transactions, underwriting positions with no quoted market price to check them against.
- Multi-Asset Solutions. Building one portfolio out of equities, bonds and alternatives for a single mandate, which makes asset allocation, not security selection, the actual skill being tested.
- External Investing Group. Evaluating other managers' funds and strategies rather than picking securities directly, closer to a diligence and manager-selection role than to traditional portfolio management.
None of these five is the "real" Goldman Sachs Asset Management job and the rest lesser versions of it. A graduate who lands in Liquidity Solutions and expected the stock-picking seat they pictured from the firm's name will be surprised in exactly the moment an interviewer expects fluency about the actual role.
Investing its own money made the business look fragile
For most of its life, a meaningful share of what Goldman called Asset Management revenue came from investing the firm's own balance sheet, not from managing other people's money for a fee. That is a fine business when markets cooperate and a genuinely uncomfortable one when they don't, because the revenue rises and falls with the portfolio's own returns rather than with a steady fee on assets under supervision.
At Goldman's first-ever Investor Day, held in January 2020, the Asset Management leadership at the time laid out a plan to change that. The 2019 baseline showed roughly $6.2 billion of on-balance-sheet revenue attributed to about $22 billion of the firm's own capital.
The five-year plan committed to remixing that capital, cutting the attributed equity by roughly $4 billion, and growing assets managed for outside clients from about $1.9 trillion toward a target near $2.4 trillion, in pursuit of what the presentation itself called revenue durability.
Three live Goldman pages, three different answers, none of them wrong for the day it describes. ⚠️ The first two are Asset Management alone; the third is the wider Asset & Wealth Management division, so the bars are not like-for-like — which is the point. The oldest figure sits on the page a candidate is most likely to read.
The 2019 to 2024 window Goldman set for itself has already passed, and the wider division's own reported number, $4.04 trillion at the end of June 2026, sits well past even the most optimistic reading of the original plan. Some of that gap is definitional: the 2026 figure covers the whole Asset & Wealth Management division rather than Asset Management alone.
Even allowing for that, the direction is unmistakable. The remix worked, and it kept working past the date the firm originally set for itself.
Test yourself
Partner levelWhat did Goldman Sachs commit Asset Management to doing with its own balance sheet at its first Investor Day in 2020?
What the remix means for the kind of person the business hires
A firm chasing balance-sheet returns hires people who can underwrite a position with the firm's own capital on the line. A firm chasing growth from outside clients needs more of something else entirely: distribution, product design, and portfolio construction built to survive a client redeeming rather than a position losing money. Both skill sets still exist inside Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The centre of gravity between them has moved, visibly, in the direction the 2020 plan pointed.
A bank whose public identity sits somewhere else
Say "Goldman Sachs" to most people and they picture trading floors and M&A tombstones, not a fund manager. That reputation is not wrong, and the firm's own numbers show why it persists even as Asset & Wealth Management grows underneath it.
In the second quarter of 2026, Goldman's Global Banking & Markets division produced record revenues of $15.5 billion. Asset & Wealth Management, in the same quarter, produced $4.6 billion, itself a record and up 20% year over year, but still roughly a quarter of the firm's total net revenue for the period.
That gap between headline identity and internal scale is not unique to Goldman among the bank-owned asset managers in this vertical, but it is unusually stark here, because the firm's brand was built almost entirely on the businesses growing more slowly than the one now getting the internal attention.
Who runs it, and who just arrived
Marc Nachmann has led Asset & Wealth Management since the role was created, sitting on Goldman's Management Committee and Firmwide Risk Council and co-chairing its Firmwide Investment Policy Committee. He is a Goldman lifer by the standards of modern finance: he joined the firm in 1994 inside Investment Banking, made partner in 2004, and ran Global Markets and then Investment Banking before taking on AWM.
Before him, the asset management side of the business was co-led by Julian Salisbury, who left Goldman for Sixth Street in 2023, leaving Nachmann as the business's sole senior voice at the top of the firm.
Seven partners, one day, one signal
On 26 January 2026, Goldman named seven partners to its Management Committee in a single announcement, every one of them from the Asset & Wealth Management franchise.
| New Management Committee member | Role |
|---|---|
| James Reynolds | Global co-head of Private Credit within Asset Management; CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management International |
| Vivek Bantwal | Global co-head of Private Credit within Asset Management |
| Michael Brandmeyer | Global head and chief investment officer, External Investing Group |
| Gregory Calnon | Global co-head of Public Investing within Asset Management |
| Kristin Olson | Global head of Alternatives for Wealth |
| John Mallory | Global co-head of Wealth Management |
| Nishi Somaiya | Global co-head of Wealth Management |
CEO David Solomon's own words on the promotions were unambiguous: growing the AWM franchise, he said, "is a core strategic objective for the firm." Seven partners promoted from one part of the business, on one day, is not a symbolic gesture. It is what a firm looks like when it means the strategy it states in press releases.
Test yourself
Interview levelWhat did Goldman Sachs' own announcement call the growth of its Asset & Wealth Management franchise in January 2026?
The last two years, in brief
Three moves since late 2025 show where the growth is going, and each one buys distribution or product capability the firm did not have in-house, in exactly the areas the 2020 remix plan pointed toward: money managed for outside clients, alternatives, and products that generate a steady fee rather than a market-dependent return.
Three deals, one direction
| Deal | Closed | What it added |
|---|---|---|
| T. Rowe Price collaboration | Announced September 2025 | Joint public-private investment solutions, pairing Goldman's private-markets reach with T. Rowe's retail distribution |
| Industry Ventures acquisition | January 2026 | A venture-capital secondaries platform inside the alternatives business |
| Innovator Capital Management acquisition | 2 April 2026 | 171 defined-outcome ETFs and roughly $31bn in assets, taking Goldman past 240 ETFs and $90bn in ETF assets globally |
None of the three is a rescue or a defensive move. Each is a purchase of capability the firm did not already have, bought specifically in the areas its own 2020 plan pointed toward.
There is no Goldman Sachs Asset Management application
This is the fact that reorganises everything else here, and almost nobody explains it to a candidate before they start applying. Goldman Sachs runs one New Analyst Program, firm-wide. A candidate ranks a handful of divisions in order of preference inside that single application, Asset Management alongside Investment Banking, Global Markets and the rest, rather than submitting a form built for asset management specifically.
The firm's own careers page for the division confirms as much indirectly: it describes the business at length and then routes an applicant into the same shared application system every other division uses, with no distinct entry point of its own.
That single structural fact changes what a candidate should do at three separate points.
- The CV is read against the firm first, the division second. A CV built to signal "asset management specialist" and nothing else can read as narrow to a recruiter deciding across the whole firm's needs.
- The order of preferences is a real decision, not a formality. Ranking Asset Management first, second or third changes how likely a candidate is to land there rather than somewhere else entirely.
- "Why asset management" has to survive being asked by someone from a different division. Interviewers are drawn from across the firm, not only from the business a candidate hopes to join, so the answer needs to work for an audience that did not choose that specialty either.
Test yourself
Interview levelHow does a candidate actually get into Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a new analyst?
Why the myth persists
Every other major bank-owned asset manager in this vertical runs something that looks, from the outside, like a dedicated door: JPMorgan has an Asset Management Analyst Program with its own tracks, Morgan Stanley recruits Investment Management per desk, UBS runs a distinct Asset Management track inside its graduate programme.
A candidate who has researched any of those three, or who has simply assumed all large asset managers work the same way, arrives at Goldman looking for the equivalent and finds nothing, because Goldman is the one major name in the group that built its process the opposite way.
What the process tests
Everything above explains why a candidate should want the job. This section is deliberately short, because the process itself is the least distinctive part of applying to Goldman Sachs Asset Management; it is identical to applying anywhere else in the firm.
- Application. Submitted through the same firm-wide system every division uses, with Asset Management selected among ranked preferences.
- First interview. A video interview lasting around thirty minutes for most candidates; engineering applicants additionally complete a HackerRank assessment.
- Superday. A final round of interviews, typically between two and five, with the exact number depending on the division a candidate is being evaluated for.
Because the funnel is shared, none of these stages is built around asset-management content specifically. A candidate who assumes there is a distinct "asset management round" somewhere in the process, testing portfolio theory or market calls the way a hedge fund interview might, will be preparing for a stage that does not exist here in that form.
What Goldman publishes about itself, and where that stops
Goldman's own "Prepare" page for student applicants is more generous than most of its peers on this point. It hosts three separate video modules, each with a downloadable transcript: Resume Advice, Interviews, and Navigating the Offer. That is genuine preparation content, not just a list of dates and eligibility rules.
What it is not is asset-management-specific. Every module on that page applies equally to a candidate heading toward Investment Banking, Global Markets, or any other division on the list. None of it touches what happens inside Asset Management once a candidate clears the shared funnel: the firm's fund history, its business lines, what changed inside it in the last two years, or what a first year in Equity looks like next to a first year in Liquidity Solutions.
How to prepare, knowing what the process rewards
None of the mechanics above replace knowing the firm in front of an interviewer, and a shared application funnel makes that knowledge more valuable, not less, because it is exactly what a generic answer cannot supply.
- Decide the preference order before the application, not during it. Ranking Asset Management first, second or third is a real decision with real consequences, and it deserves more thought than most candidates give it.
- Build an answer to "why asset management" that survives a non-specialist interviewer. Assume the person across the table may come from a different division entirely, and make the case in terms that still land.
- Know the last two years, not just the fee model. The Innovator, Industry Ventures and T. Rowe Price moves are recent enough that most incumbent guides do not mention them, and specific enough that citing one signals real preparation.
- Do not confuse Asset Management with Wealth Management inside a shared AWM posting. They are different jobs, and assuming they are interchangeable is the fastest way to sound unprepared to someone who works in either one.
- Treat the firm's own prep videos as a floor, not a ceiling. They cover CV structure and interview basics well. They say nothing about the fund history, the business lines, or the strategy shift that actually separate Goldman from its peers.
Test yourself
Partner levelWhy do three different Goldman Sachs web pages state three different assets-under-supervision totals for the same business?
There is no separate application
Goldman Sachs Asset Management was built in 1988 to survive a crash, not to chase one, and everything distinctive about it today still traces back to that instinct: pull revenue away from anything that swings with the market, grow the parts that charge a steady fee instead, and keep doing it long after the original five-year plan said to stop. The firm's own numbers show that instinct working.
Its hiring process shows something else entirely: a candidate who goes looking for a Goldman Sachs Asset Management application will not find one, because there was never meant to be one. There is only Goldman Sachs, one process, and a preference ranked somewhere on a list.
