Goldman Sachs partners with Walmart to offer SMB loans to online sellers
- Goldman Sachs has built its retail Marcus brand into a $100 billion bank.
- It continues to sign partnerships with leading brands to provide financing to their customers.
Goldman Sachs continues its push into banking, both directly and through partnerships.
What’s happening: Beginning this week, sellers on Walmart’s Marketplace will be invited to apply for business lines of credit offered by Marcus, Goldman’s retail brand. Walmart’s online sales have soared during the current pandemic, growing 97% year-over-year during the second quarter, and Walmart.com’s Marketplace, which allows third parties to sell to Walmart customers, sales grew triple digits.
- Sellers can tap lines of credit between $10,000 and up to $75,000.
- A source familiar with the details said that Marcus hopes to raise the potential line of credit for qualifying customers to as high as $1 million, according to Yahoo Finance.
- The credit lines have an annual interest rate between 6.99% and 20.99%.
- Merchants selling on Walmart’s Marketplace will see a notification in their Seller Center dashboard inviting them to apply for credit.
SPONSORED
“Access to affordable capital is more important than ever as businesses large and small work to adapt and evolve to serve customers and grow their businesses,” Jeff Clementz, vice president of Walmart Marketplace, said in a blog post.
Goldman’s move into ecosystems: Goldman’s strategy for Marcus is to embed financial products inside large partners’ ecosystems.
- Goldman’s first foray into embedded finance was with Apple Card, which it provides the financing for.
- Marcus also powers installment loans for JetBlue so customers can finance trips at the point of sale.
- Similar to the Walmart partnership, Amazon announced in June that Goldman Sachs would provide lines of credit to U.S sellers on its marketplace.
“We want to do what Amazon has done to retail, or what Apple has done to music, where you innovate on the distribution and consumption experience for the consumer,” said Harit Talwar, partner and global head of Goldman Sachs’ consumer business, at the Tearsheet Resilience Conference in July.
Another great example of Goldman continuing to execute on their strategy to build out an eco-system of connected brands. Goldman is going to continue to look to partner with iconic brands that have large user bases who will need Goldman’s “embedded financial solutions” in order to better serve their customers.
“The credit lines have an annual interest rate between 6.99% and 20.99%.” I know the first reaction for a lot of readers is, “Holy cow, interest rates at nearly 21% is excessive.” I think the important takeaway is that this is probably a good deal if merchants qualify for the lower tier of rates, but if there is no better financing option, even 21% is OK for the short-term. Financing for a small business can be the difference between making it or not.