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JPMorgan Chase has agreed to take over the loans underpinning Apple’s credit card portfolio from rival Goldman Sachs, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The deal extricates Goldman from one of the last businesses related to its ill-fated effort to become a major player in retail banking.
Moving the portfolio, which has about $20bn in loans, over to JPMorgan, the largest US bank with more than $4tn in assets, will be a test of the relationship between two of the biggest names in corporate America.
Apple often sets demanding terms in its business partnerships, while JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon has repeatedly called out the iPhone maker as an emerging competitor as banking becomes increasingly digital.
At the end of September, JPMorgan had about $235bn in credit card loans and is the second-largest lender in the more than $1tn US credit card industry, behind Capital One.
Under Tim Cook, Apple has gradually built out its offering of financial services to include payments, digital wallets and lending. Dimon said in 2023 that Apple was “becoming a bank”. The talks between Apple and JPMorgan have been going on for more than a year.
The Apple credit card had about $20bn in loans and JPMorgan was paying a roughly $1bn discount to the par value of the portfolio, the person familiar with the matter said. Apple and JPMorgan will also work together on an Apple-branded savings account.
JPMorgan and Goldman declined to comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. News of the deal was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
Apple and Goldman announced the partnership in 2019 as a landmark deal for Goldman, which committed to building an entirely new credit card infrastructure tailored to the Big Tech company’s needs.
Goldman’s retail banking business, pursued under the Marcus brand, proved unpopular with investors and racked up billions of dollars in losses. That led to chief executive David Solomon’s decision to dramatically scale back the effort in late 2022.
Goldman had already agreed to move its other credit card partnership with General Motors to Barclays in 2024.
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