Wall Street can stop wondering who the most powerful woman at Goldman Sachs might be.
Goldman chief executive David Solomon announced Tuesday that he has shuffled the executive ranks once again, this time making Stephanie Cohen co-head of the $2 trillion megabank’s consumer banking and wealth management group.
Cohen, a 43-year-old insider who has been Goldman’s chief strategy officer since 2017, is the first woman to lead her own group under Solomon, who dramatically reorganized the bank’s operations in January. That streamlining created the consumer banking group, which contains Goldman’s fledgling Marcus savings account business and AppleCard businesses.
Solomon has long touted the consumer division as playing a key part in Goldman’s future. By putting Cohen in this new role, he also is boosting her profile in Goldman’s line of succession. Cohen has long been seen as a Solomon favorite, and running a key division will provide her with the experience and clout that she will need to compete for his job when he leaves the C-suite.
Running the division alongside her new co-head Tucker York also transforms Cohen immediately into one of the most powerful women on Wall Street and the latest female contender to lead a major bank.
Solomon, 58, took the helm at Goldman in October 2018. His No. 2 exec, president and operating chief John Waldron, is only 50 and is viewed as his de facto successor. Still, Gary Cohn held the No. 2 job for more than a decade before he left to join the Trump White House in January 2017 after it became clear he wouldn’t succeed former CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Meanwhile, Wall Street banks are increasingly looking for female CEOs. Citigroup’s Jane Fraser just became the first CEO of a major US bank, and women look poised to take the reins at Bank of America and JPMorgan.
Cohen will ostensibly replace longtime Goldman partner Timothy O’Neill, who is currently head of Consumer & Investment Management, a division that will be obsolete in 2021 thanks to the reorganization. O’Neill will step back into the bank’s executive office as senior counselor, a role that appears very similar to the one he held under three of Solomon’s CEO predecessors.
Goldman also announced Tuesday that Harit Talwar will step aside from his day-to-day management of Marcus after five years, making way for Goldman partner Omer Ismail to take charge of the bank’s biggest consumer product.
All in all, Goldman announced seven executive moves on Tuesday, with Cohen being the only woman to change desks.
At the beginning of 2020, Solomon made the bold statement that Goldman will no longer handle IPOs for companies with all-male boards, but progress inside Goldman to promote women has appeared slow.
Just a week after his IPO pronouncement at the Davos conference in January, Solomon held Goldman’s first-ever Investor Day featuring speeches and presentations from top Goldman execs. As The Post reported at the time, the first 11 speakers that day were men, making it more than five hours until a woman took the stage.
That woman was Cohen.