(Reuters) -Goldman Sachs Group Inc said on Wednesday it would buy GreenSky Inc, a fintech platform that provides consumer loans for home improvement, in an all-stock deal valued at $2.24 billion.
The deal implies a per-share price of $12.11 for each GreenSky Class A common stock, representing a 55% premium to the company’s closing price on Tuesday.
Atlanta-based GreenSky, which went public in 2018 at a valuation of about $4 billion, has provided home improvement loans to about four million customers.
Its purchase will further bulk up Goldman’s consumer banking unit Marcus, which is named after one of the bank’s founders and is a key plank of Chief Executive David Solomon’s plan to reduce Goldman’s reliance on volatile trading and investment banking revenues.
“We have been clear in our aspiration for Marcus to become the consumer banking platform of the future, and the acquisition of GreenSky advances this goal,” Solomon said in a statement.
Reuters reported https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-goldman-eyes-deals-boost-marcus-sources-2021-01-15 earlier this year that Goldman was considering acquisitions to build out Marcus after the Wall Street firm slowed loan and deposit growth at the business last year in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Aditya Soni)
