Goldman Sachs looks to ‘Amazon’-like ecosystem with MarketView launch

Chris Churchman describes MarketView, a new visual analytics dashboarding ecosystem launched this week by Goldman Sachs, as his baby. Churchman, head of Goldman Sachs Marquee, joined the firm in July 2021 and started filing patents for MarketView shortly thereafter. MarketView is available through the bank’s Marquee platform and provides visual insights developed by Goldman Sachs’ researchers.

“It makes Goldman Sachs integral to [a client’s] thought process,” Churchman tells WatersTechnology. A user does not have to trade with Goldman to use MarketView, but Churchman hopes they will.

MarketView, which is patent-pending, provides visual insights “developed by Goldman Sachs thought leaders that answer important questions in global markets with bespoke data analytics,” according to the firm. It allows users to follow Goldman Sachs market trend analyses across asset classes, create personalized dashboards, and share insights with colleagues.

Churchman sees MarketView a bit like Amazon. Clients can access the analytics Goldman has generated from a vendor’s data and, if they choose, opt to buy that data themselves. The platform is prepopulated with a series of charts and widgets created by Goldman’s research team. Users with a subscription can create their own. The accompanying mobile app presents like an Instagram feed, where traders can scroll through the widgets. 

“You might not always only trade with Goldman, but we want to be in the loop every time,” Churchman says. After a client uses MarketView to design their investment thesis and begins to decide what and who to trade with, Churchman explains, “Goldman should be one of the counterparties you ask because we’ve helped you with that.”  

Churchman, formerly an FX trader, recalls last winter when the beginning of the war in Ukraine cast doubt over whether Germany had sufficient gas reserves to get through the winter. He remembers seeing one chart that gave him confidence that the country did, but he never found it again. A tool like MarketView, he says, is meant to fix that.

“I’m sitting on my sofa at Christmas, and I see, ‘Hmm, it’s really not drawing down as fast as I thought it would.’ Then I take something else that shows the temperature in Europe and see, ‘Yeah, it’s a bit milder than they were worried about,’ and I think, ‘They’ll be all right,’” he says.

At present, many traders consult a series of screenshots, Excel charts, and research PDFs to build their investment theses.

“If that genuinely is your investment thesis, you’ve just made it really, really hard to keep track of,” Churchman says, adding that a lot of time is spent in the industry simply refreshing analyses.

Over the next year, Churchman says increasing the speed at which a trader can consult their research and then execute their trade will be a priority. MarketView has onboarded data providers including the London Stock Exchange Group, FactSet, MSCI, Axioma, and Wolfe. He says two more vendors have asked to be added since the announcement of the launch.

“It’s a win–win with vendors because vendors want us to shop-front their data,” Churchman says. Eventually, he adds, Goldman hopes to have as much data as it can get. “That’s what we do for a living. We take financial markets data, and we say, ‘This seems to be what’s happening.’”