PE firms Watch GreenSky By Goldman At A Big Discount

Press reports say that several financial firms have offered to buy Goldman Sachs’s BNPL home improvement lender GreenSky.

Apollo, Sixth Street, and Warburg Pincus have all made bids, and Semafor says that all of them are in the “mid-nine figures.” That would be a big discount from the $2.24 billion Goldman paid in September 2021.

Semafor says that some of the bids only cover GreenSky’s loan-writing business, while others also include loans that were already on Goldman’s books.

GreenSky is a good business, but Goldman CEO David Solomon said in April that he wanted to sell it because given our current strategic priorities, we may not be the best long-term holder of this business.

Goldman’s first step away from the consumer market was in October of last year, when it split off Marcus and put it into a separate business for asset and wealth management.

In January, it said that its “Platform Solutions” unit, which includes the company’s transaction banking, credit cards, and Greensky, lost $1.2 billion before taxes in the first nine months of 2022.

Stephanie Cohen took a personal leave of absence last week, so the Platform Solutions unit was also without a boss for a while.