Goldman Sachs Group Inc’ investment management co-head Marc Spilker is leaving the firm after two decades and will be replaced by a predecessor.
Spilker, 45, will turn over responsibilities at the end of February to Edward Forst, who rejoined the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history in September from Harvard University, according to internal memorandums yesterday from Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and President Gary Cohn.
The group also announced the imminent departure of its director Ruth Simmons after 10 years because of “increasing time requirements” in her role as Brown University president.
Simmons, 64, had been a director since January 2000. She was president of Smith University from 1995 until June 2001 and previously served as provost of Princeton.
“Ruth has made an enormous contribution to Goldman Sachs over the past 10 years,” Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said in the statement.
These exits are the latest of a series of changes atop investment management, which accounts for less than 10 per cent of the firm’s revenue. Spilker and Tim O’Neill were elevated to help run it in June 2008, when Forst, 49, left to oversee finances at Harvard, his alma mater, after less than a year at the division.
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“There’s a history there of no one really running asset management for a long period of time,” said Henry Higdon, managing partner at recruitment firm Higdon Partners LLC in New York. “Have any of the leaders of the firm ever come from asset management? I don’t think so. They’re all from trading or investment banking.”
Winkelried’s departure
Spilker’s departure comes less than six weeks after Goldman Sachs added Steven H Strongin, global head of investment research, to the management committee. Including both Spilker and Strongin, there are 31 members of the committee. Goldman Sachs last lost a member of the committee on March 31, when Jon Winkelried, who had been co-president with Cohn, left after 27 years.
Investment management, which manages funds for institutions and wealthy individuals, is a smaller department at Goldman Sachs than investment banking and trading. The division’s 2009 revenue of $3.97 billion was about 8.8 per cent of the firm’s revenue and was down 13 per cent from 2008, as both management fees and incentive fees declined.
Three months before Forst left for Harvard, division co-head Peter Kraus departed after almost 22 years at the firm, later surfacing at Merrill Lynch to work with former Goldman Sachs colleague John Thain. Eric Schwartz, a previous co-head of the division, left Goldman Sachs in 2007 after 23 years.
Spilker joined Goldman Sachs in 1990 and became a partner in 1996. Before joining the investment management division in 2006 as head of global alternative asset management, Spilker was responsible for US equities trading and global equity derivatives.
He previously ran fixed-income, currencies, and commodities in Japan and served as global head of foreign exchange options.