In his late teens, Hari Moorthy discovered meditation, and he found it to be an effective way to clear his thoughts and focus on difficult tasks.
More than 20 years later, the global head of Transaction Banking, or TxB, at Goldman Sachs has found weekly meditation sessions to be vital as he develops a banking-as-a-service software model for the investment bank's corporate clients.
And he’s not alone — his team members have found it helpful as well. Several of them join Moorthy when he leads a weekly meditation session at Goldman's New York office.
"The point of it all is to be able to listen to others, and to do that, you have to be able to listen to yourself," said Moorthy, a finalist in American Banker's 2021 Digital Banker of the Year honors.
Moorthy's team launched the TxB digital platform in 2020. Goldman Sachs, referring to application programming interfaces, proclaimed it was the "only transaction bank with a 100% cloud-based, API-led global platform."
Under Moorthy's guidance, the Transaction Banking team grew from a dozen employees in 2018 to what is projected to be more than 600 by the end of 2021. The bank also expects revenue from Transaction Banking to reach $1 billion within five years.
Moorthy found his way to financial services through an indirect route. While pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at Bria Institute of Technology and Science at Pilani, India, he took a job in a commercial setting for a time to make ends meet. He ended up working for CheckFree Services for nearly 10 years before joining Goldman Sachs in 2007.
Moorthy has had two tenures at Goldman, first as global head of the development practices group and chief technology officer for global prime services, from 2007 to 2014. He went on to join JPMorgan Chase as a managing director for four years, before returning to Goldman in 2018 to begin creating the bank's first cloud-based and API-driven transaction service.
When thinking about complex and interconnected problems like TxB, Moorthy has found that grounding himself and breaking the complex problems into simpler parts makes success easier to envision.
"I have often thought about what the difference is between imagination and innovation," he said. "We all daydream and want to build things, and I began thinking about this with the project's early days, and often wondered what if we had an infinite budget and infinite people, what could we do?"
The reality was, Moorthy had about 12 people when the project started in 2018, so he had to consider what parts of his imagination could work under the manpower and budget constraints.
"That is innovation," he said.
To even start the process of imagining a new service for the bank, Moorthy had to confront what he felt might be the hardest question: How could Goldman Sachs, in essentially building "a new-concept fintech within a bank that is a mature business," entice people to join the team?
"That ended up being easier than I thought," Moorthy said. "The motivation to build something from scratch appeals to a lot of folks."
The project had a clear target market: corporations expanding globally but working with U.S. commercial and treasury banks that had legacy back-end infrastructure upward of 40 years old, resulting in many manual processes for transactions.
But TxB also opened doors to key partnerships that may have never been possible had Moorthy not paved the way for Goldman Sachs to position itself as a technology player with modern digital payments and corporate account onboarding processes in place.
Goldman was able to land a partnership with the e-commerce payments processor Stripe in which its banking-as-a-service software would be embedded into Stripe's offerings.
"We don't have a branch strategy at Goldman Sachs, so this was an effective way to capture small and medium businesses through partnerships," Moorthy said.
But with patience — and mindfulness — Moorthy made sure the $1.9 trillion-asset investment bank made up for lost time.
Goldman waited until 2019 to dive into new corporate payments technology, and “we skipped some generations of technology and went right to APIs and doing partnerships with other ecosystem players," Moorthy said. "Payments take an extraordinarily long time when using bank processes that are 30 to 40 years old. We looked at it and said, ‘We could build this natively.’"
