GS Goldman Sachs Group Inc

By Liz Hoffman and Peter Rudegeair 

A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner who oversaw the bank's business of packaging mortgages and other consumer loans for sale to investors is leaving for TPG Special Situations Partners, according to people familiar with the matter.

Michelle Gill will join TSSP, an investing arm of San Francisco-based buyout shop TPG, after a customary "garden leave," the people said. Ms. Gill rose through the ranks of Goldman's mortgage-bond unit before the financial crisis, and after it, helped develop the firm's consumer-finance business, which trades loans backed by auto, student and unsecured personal debt.

She recently moved from New York to San Francisco, home to upstart lenders that have sprung up in recent years, such as LendingClub Corp. and Social Finance Inc. Those companies have sought to eat away at banks' lending business by connecting borrowers and investors who want to buy loans, while taking little risk themselves.

Goldman was an early leader in helping to connect these lenders with investors, which allows them to continue to churn out loans. Goldman earns fees by finding buyers for the loans, in some cases bundling them into securities for easier trading.

But more recently, it has become a competitor. Last year, Goldman launched an online consumer-lending platform, Marcus, that makes unsecured personal loans of a few thousand dollars to individual borrowers.

An internal memo sent to Goldman employees late Friday morning confirmed Ms. Gill was retiring.

"During her tenure at the firm, Michelle...has developed trusted relationships with numerous clients and has played a central role in many important and innovative transactions," the memo said.

TSSP, which manages about $19 billion, was launched in 2009 when a group of Goldman traders moved to the buyout firm. It is led by Alan Waxman, who for years ran a group at Goldman that invested the firm's own capital -- a business that had less of a home inside a bank after the financial crisis.

TPG itself, which oversees about $70 billon in assets, in 2015 hired ex-Goldman executive Jon Winkelried as its co-chief executive. Jack Daly, a partner in Goldman's private-equity division, joined in 2016 to head TPG's industrial-companies investing group.

Ms. Gill joined Goldman in 2003 and was named a partner in 2010. Her new role wasn't immediately clear. TPG has a commercial-mortgage business in the U.S., which manages about $3 billion in assets, and in 2015 bought a U.K. residential-mortgage portfolio from the Lehman Brothers estate. The special-situations group invests opportunistically, with a focus on credit.

Her departure comes as Goldman is edging back into the mortgage-buying space. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the bank has been acquiring delinquent loans, aiming to ease terms on borrowers to meet the terms of its 2016 government settlement.

It also comes as Goldman is focused on promoting and retaining women partners. Its most recent partnership class, named last November, was 23% women, a record. And Goldman has promoted women to key roles covering private-equity firms, wealthy families and technology companies, but it still has fewer women at the top than some of its rivals.

Write to Liz Hoffman at liz.hoffman@wsj.com and Peter Rudegeair at Peter.Rudegeair@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 24, 2017 12:23 ET (16:23 GMT)

Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024

Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024