Goldman Sachs wants to build the ‘Pinterest for capital markets.’ Here’s how the bank is aiming to win more trades from its biggest institutional clients.

• Goldman Sachs launched a new platform that helps clients analyze and visualize financial markets.
• Called MarketView, the dashboard is part of the bank’s risk analysis and trading platform, Marquee.
• Chris Churchman, head of Marquee, outlines how it works and what the bank needs to succeed.

Goldman Sachs is looking to Amazon.com and Pinterest for inspiration to help its risk analytics and trading platform, Marquee, become the go-to tool for investors and win more trading business.

The bank launched a customizable dashboard on Tuesday to assist Goldman’s institutional investor clients in understanding the state of financial markets.

Currently, that’s a somewhat messy and manual process spread across several platforms, according to Chris Churchman, Goldman Sachs partner and head of Marquee. Traders may switch between Bloomberg, Tableau dashboards, PDFs of research, and email commentaries to understand what’s going on with the Canadian dollar or Apple stock. Following that, they may take screenshots, place them in a PowerPoint presentation or an email, and lay out the case for why a particular trade makes sense. However, because the thesis is made up of disparate bits of information, it can be difficult to keep track of, and minor changes may necessitate rebuilding analyses from scratch.

MarketView, a tool populated with graphs and charts to track and analyze financial markets across asset classes, is Goldman’s solution to this problem. The goal is to introduce a new purchasing process in financial markets that is so efficient that institutional investors will trade with Goldman and help the bank increase its transactional revenue.

With Wall Street trading volumes down, banks have had to get creative in order to reclaim market share from market makers like Citadel Securities and Virtu, which have automated placing simpler trades with computers. Banks like Goldman Sachs benefit from more complex trades that require more work, such as a complicated derivative with legs and hedges.

Churchman believes that allowing clients to ask questions quickly, making it easier to find answers, and having it all happen on one platform will make Goldman much more convenient. He stated that his goal for MarketView is for it to be similar to how Amazon.com transformed online shopping by making it simple to discover new items and capturing e-commerce market share.

“They help me make quick and high-quality decisions about what exactly to buy,” Churchman went on to say. “And because they enable me to be so efficient and effective in my buying process, I’m going to give them the show every single time,”

Goldman wants to rewire how its clients make trades with Marquee MarketView

MarketView’s meat is in the graphs and charts, which are visual representations of answers to questions like what the Fed’s expected hike path is or how 10-year Japanese Yen swaps behave between Bank of Japan meetings. The same question about JPY could be applied to another currency, generating a new chart in seconds. Goldman wants to amass a library of “evergreen” questions that clients frequently ask when designing a trade, according to Churchman.

The charts combine data from FactSet, LSEG, Axioma, and MSCI, as well as some internal and proprietary Goldman data, making it a “one-stop shop” for Goldman’s clients.

MarketView also has a collaborative component. The analyses are intended to be shared with colleagues and clients in order to avoid building the same piece of analysis multiple times by different people. The charts, as well as any secret sauce they may contain, can be kept private as well.

“What clients have said to me is, you basically created Pinterest for capital markets, or you’re creating a social network for capital markets,” Churchman told me. “And I think we’re not there yet, to be clear, but this is where it could get to if we succeed in this.”

The tool’s success is contingent on a critical mass of users. For Marquee MarketView to be the game changer that Goldman hopes it is, it must be the place where their buy-side clients consistently shape their investment theses — and make trades — in the same way that someone’s Instagram feed may become stale if the accounts they follow aren’t creating new content.

“If we get that flywheel going, then it’ll be very, very powerful,” said Churchman.