Note from the Publisher: Okay. At Lendit Europe, a principal from Thiel Capital, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel's VC endeavor, stated that they felt that Marcus, the new Goldman Sachs' online consuming lending endeavor was - if not doomed to failure - at least going to be a non-factor, and that was reiterated by several others in the room. Now, they COULD be right, but it IS Goldman, and folks in our house are pretty sure they run the US economy - either through the front door or the back door. So, trash talking Goliath worked out fine for David (okay, I'm paraphrasing just a bit), but I would never be so cocky as to rule Goldman out of succeeding at anything. They're not impervious to failure, but, well, they're GOLDMAN.
"Goldman Sachs' plans to get into the online lending industry were largely dismissed by a panel of US fintech insiders at the LendIt Europe conference in London on Tuesday.
The panel were asked what they made of the investment bank's yet-to-launch service Marcus, an online platform that will make small consumer loans — a big departure for the bulge-bracket investment bank.
Goldman has reportedly had 100 people working on the project, according to the New York Times, a huge staff compared to a fintech startup.
But three out of the four panelists dismissed the investment bank's chances in the market.
Phin Upham, a principle at San Francisco-based Thiel Capital, a fund set up by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, said: 'The lending side, I don’t see why Goldman would do well, I don’t see why it would be interesting or frankly why they would do it at all.'"
Read full Article at BusinessInsider