The burning question on Wall Street this week (besides who's getting hammered by the fall of crypto giant FTX) is who made partner at Goldman Sachs.
Goldman is considered one of most successful banks on Wall Street, and its partner title is the highest ranking position below the C-suite. Being named partner, therefore, is like being inducted into Wall Street's most exclusive club.
This year's list (80 people made the cut) is the largest since David Solomon took over as CEO in 2018. It's also the most diverse in the company's 153-year-old history. Fifty-six percent of the class are diverse hires, including 23 women, 19 Asians, 7 Blacks, 2 Hispanics/Latinx, and 2 who identify as LGBTQ, the company said.
The newest partners also include several Goldman lifers with 43% of the class having joined fresh out of college.
Advertisement
Of course, making money still reigns supreme at Goldman, and this year's list is chockfull of rainmakers. It includes a star derivatives trader, a top healthcare banker, and star trader who has become one of Wall Street's leading voices in discussing the Black experience in America.
Here are 5 top names who will help shape the Wall Street of tomorrow.
Fernando Rivera Courtesy of Goldman SachsFernando Rivera
Fernando Rivera heads FICC structuring and solutions in the Americas, meaning he helps assemble and market highly complex trades to Goldman's clients across a broad range of products. He earned promotion to partnership after 16 years at the bank — but he is not the first in his family to make partner at Goldman.
The Rivera family is an unlikely pipeline of talent from Honduras to Wall Street banking — Fernando's three brothers also migrated from Honduras to study at Loyola University in New Orleans before embarking on careers in finance.
Advertisement
Osmin Rivera, Goldman's head of currencies and emerging markets trading in the Americas, was promoted to partner in 2020. He started out at JPMorgan trading subprime mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis.
Jorge Rivera joined Citigroup in 2021 as an executive director after eight years at JPMorgan in New York and a handful in Mexico. Ricardo Rivera is an ED in Morgan Stanley's securitized products group, but before that he also worked at Goldman for three years in mortgage-backed securities.
For Fernando Rivera, entry to Goldman's partnership comes after nearly two decades on Wall Street. He started out marketing derivatives in Latin America for JPMorgan in 2004 and jumped to Goldman in 2006. At Goldman, he earned promotion to managing director in 2012 and previously held leadership roles in Goldman's strats group and sat on the operating committee for global FICC and equities strat sales.
Ben Wallace of Goldman Sachs Courtesy of Goldman SachsBen Wallace
Ben Wallace joined Goldman in 2018 after more than a decade in mergers and acquisitions at rival JPMorgan. The healthcare dealmaker has seemingly fit right in, helping deliver a string of blockbuster deals that helped earn him passage to the prestigious partnership ranks — including the largest leveraged-buyout in more than a decade.
Advertisement
Last year, a consortium of private-equity shops including Blackstone and Carlyle group bought Medline Industries, a medical equipment manufacturer, for more than $30 billion including debt. Wallace was among the Goldman bankers advising Medline, according to people familiar with the matter, on what became the largest LBO since the financial crisis. It wasn't the only megadeal he worked on in 2021; he also advised on Hillrom's sale to Baxter, a $10.5 billion tie-up of two medical technology companies.
In 2020, he helped advise on cancer tech company Varian's $16.4 billion sale to Siemens Healthineers, sources said. More recently, Wallace was part of the Goldman team that advised Signify Health, a healthcare service company, on its $8 billion sale to CVS in September.
He started his Wall Street career as a summer associate in M&A at JPMorgan in 2006. He was promoted to managing director in 2016 and left for Goldman two years later.
Brandon Watkins of Goldman Sachs Courtesy of Goldman SachsBrandon Watkins
Brandon Watkins is one of the younger Goldman executives to get the nod for partner this year, not yet at his 35th birthday.
Advertisement
In the 12 years that he's been at Goldman, Watkins has helped Goldman advise on some of the technology industry's biggest transactions. His team underwrote the IPOs for such high-profile firms as Square, Robinhood, Affirm and Lemonade, according to his LinkedIn profile. When eBay spun off PayPal back in 2015, Watkins was on the team that advised on that transaction too.
Now, Watkins is head of digital finance for Goldman's investment banking division, which has maintained the top spot among IPO underwriters for many years running.
Watkins spent a summer as an analyst at Louis Vuitton before joining Goldman as an intern the next summer, and then full time the summer after that. He went to Huntington Beach High School in the tony Southern California town, and then attended the University of California, Los Angeles.
At UCLA, Watkins was the president of the Undergraduate Business Society and a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, his Linkedin profile shows.
Jessica Janowitz of Goldman Sachs Courtesy of Goldman Sachs
Jessica Janowitz
Jessica Janowitz's rise to partner tops a 17-year career at Goldman and makes her one of the record number of women handed the title Wednesday when Goldman made its biannual announcement.
Advertisement
Janowitz is head of US equity derivative sales, a role that has her overseeing a team of salespeople that sells instruments tied to the value of corporate stocks, such as options and swaps, to large investment funds, according to a bio on the website of non-profit MacroMinds.
It's a familiar product for Janowitz, who has spent most if not all of her Goldman career in that business. Prior to being named to run the team, Janowitz was on the relationship management team where she worked closely with Goldman's biggest hedge fund and asset management clients to come up with solutions to their short-term and long-term investment needs, according to the bio.
Janowitz is also a Goldman lifer, one of the 34 new partners who joined the bank right out of college. She joined Goldman in 2005 after earning magna cum laude honors from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. She earned the managing director title a decade later.
Courtesy of Goldman SachsFrederick Baba
Frederick Baba has been at Goldman for the last eight years, first as a vice president on the interest rate products team, then as a managing director who headed the rates systematic market making team and USD linear rates trading.
Advertisement
Baba's not just a stellar trader. He has also been a leading voice in discussing the Black experience on Wall Street. He wrote an internal memo about the topic to the firm following the death of George Floyd in 2020 (which turned into an op-ed in Bloomberg), spoke on a Goldman podcast, and rang the NYSE bell for 8 minute and 46 seconds in Floyd's honor.
"I needed to say something and indeed articulate something," he said in an August 2020 interview with Insider for our 2020 Rising Stars of Wall Street list. "What is it that I want the people who are interacting with me to know about how I'm processing all of this."
As Insider previously reported, Baba was born in Nigeria and emigrated with his family to New Orleans, where his parents taught at Tulane University. They later moved to Cincinnati before Baba left to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT he was a bioengineering major — his Instagram profile teases "my parents wanted me to be a doctor." But when he couldn't get an internship reserved for Ph.D. hopefuls, he spent a summer using his coding skills in UBS's automated trading department.
After graduating in 2010, he went to work for the Global Electronic Trading Co., known on Wall Street as GETCO. About four years later, he got started at Goldman on a then new team set up to trade stocks and bonds electronically.