Goldman ‘deal guy’ behind Apple, GM playing cards leaves for fintech start-up iCreditWorks

A Goldman Sachs government identified for securing a few of the business’s greatest bank card offers in recent times has left to hitch early stage start-up iCreditWorks, CNBC has discovered.

Scott Young, who was chief industrial officer of Goldman’s Marcus client enterprise, will likely be becoming a member of the New Jersey-based firm subsequent month, in response to iCreditWorks founder Stephen Sweeney.

Young is the newest in a string of exits from Goldman’s client enterprise sparked by the February 2021 defection of Omer Ismail, the previous Marcus head who joined Walmart’s fintech start-up with a key deputy. Those departures embody the previous CFO and head of product for the enterprise, and extra not too long ago the unit’s branding chief.

Known informally at Goldman because the “deal guy,” Young joined in 2017 as its first head of partnerships, a part of a wave of out of doors hires throughout the launch of the agency’s retail-banking division. He is credited with serving to safe the financial institution’s Apple Card partnership in 2018 together with Ismail and former CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and oversaw a string of subsequent co-branding offers with the likes of GM, JetBlue, AARP and Amazon.

Before becoming a member of Goldman, Young labored at GE, Barclays after which Citigroup, the place he helped wrest the Costco card away from American Express in 2015. That was a seismic deal within the card business, the place the largest contracts with corporations together with Costco, Amazon and American Airlines could make up a disproportionate share of an issuer’s enterprise.

At iCreditWorks, Young will likely be tasked with persevering with to make offers.

The start-up’s fundamental product is a degree of sale cellular app that handles the appliance, vetting and funding for private loans. The preliminary target market is well being care and elective medication, taking up business chief CareCredit, a unit of Synchrony Bank.

After that, they’ll transfer into different areas together with auto and home-improvement loans, Sweeney stated.

“When you’re trying to build a disruptive platform that has wide commercial appeal, you need an executive who has the chops to make those deals happen,” Sweeney stated. “As chief commercial officer at Goldman, he was at the nexus of all those transactions; sourcing, negotiating and securing deals.”

Sweeney stated that he and his companions, a bunch of serial entrepreneurs, have plowed greater than $50 million into iCreditWorks since its founding three years in the past. That inflow of funds has helped Sweeney snap up banking veterans together with Suresh Nair, who serves as chief info expertise officer. Nair was a senior expertise officer at Bank of America and helped engineer Merrill Lynch’s buying and selling platform.

The firm not too long ago employed Truist Financial to boost its first spherical of out of doors funding, searching for $50 million at a roughly $200 million valuation, Sweeney stated.