JPMorgan wants the platform that exhausted developers at Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs' brief, yet eventful, foray into the consumer market will go down as a blip in its history. Within this blip, one of the most problematic projects was the Apple Card, which may now move to JPMorgan. 

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Apple Card has had suitors before. American Express said to be interested last year, but has since quashed the rumors. JPMorgan may yet walk away too: the Wall Street Journal reports that its talks with Goldman are early stage and that a price has yet to be negotiated.

Goldman Sachs may be glad to see the back of its endeavor. From the start, getting the Apple Card off the ground at Goldman was an ordeal. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that the firm spent $300m on the project known internally as Project Cookie and diverted thousands of engineers to work on the launch when it was delayed by a security vulnerability. That delayed other projects, and Goldman's engineers can't have felt too flattered by Apple's tagline for the card: "Designed by Apple, not a bank."

The card was managed within Goldman's Marcus retailing banking team, which had its own divisive reputation. The Marcus stack was said to be modern, free from legacy constraints... and expensive. The working culture, however, was said to be hard driving with 12-14 hour days. In 2021, Business Insider said that it was much more lax, with 9-10 hour days, prior to the Apple Card's involvement.

In the Apple Card team more recently, numbers have been dwindling. "They're starting to look to the exits," one California-based Goldman Sachs engineer told us. "No one wants to be the last engineer standing when they pull the plug." Former MDs have been spotted working at everywhere from eBay to Walmart.

Recent exits from the Apple Card team, like Apple itself, are defecting to JPMorgan. Dallas-based Khoa Bui spent three years at Goldman as an engineer for the Apple Card but joined JPMorgan's own digibank, Chase, in July. That same month, Margaret Stevens, a VP and the Apple Card's head of marketing and promotions, joined JPMorgan in New York as a VP in marketing strategy.

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