Goldman ‘deal guy’ behind Apple, GM cards leaves for fintech start-up iCreditWorks

A Goldman Sachs executive known for securing some of the industry’s biggest credit-card deals in recent years has left to join early stage start-up iCreditWorks, CNBC has learned.

Scott Young, who was chief commercial officer of Goldman’s Marcus consumer business, will be joining the New Jersey-based start-up next month, according to iCreditWorks founder Stephen Sweeney.

Young is the latest in a string of exits from Goldman’s consumer business sparked by the February 2021 defection of Omer Ismail, the former Marcus head who joined Walmart’s fintech startup with a key deputy. Those departures include the former CFO and head of product for the business, and more recently the unit’s branding chief.

Known informally at Goldman as the “deal guy,” Young joined in 2017 as its first head of partnerships, part of a wave of outside hires as the investment bank launched its retail banking division. He is credited with helping secure the bank’s Apple Card partnership in 2018 along with Ismail and former CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and oversaw a string of subsequent co-branding deals with companies including GM, JetBlue, AARP and Amazon.

Before joining Goldman, Young worked at GE, Barclays and then Citigroup, where he helped wrest the Costco card away from American Express in 2015. That was a seismic deal in the card industry, where the biggest contracts with companies including Costco, Amazon and American Airlines can make up a disproportionate share of an issuer’s business.

At iCreditWorks, Young will be tasked with continuing to make deals.

Its main product is a point of sale mobile app that handles the application, vetting and funding for personal loans. The initial target audience is healthcare and elective medicine, taking on industry leader CareCredit, a unit of Synchrony Bank.

After that, they will move into other areas including auto and home improvement loans, Sweeney said.

“When you’re trying to build a disruptive platform that has wide commercial appeal, you need an executive who has the chops to make those deals happen,” Sweeney said. “As chief commercial officer at Goldman, he was at the nexus of all those transactions, sourcing, negotiating and securing deals.”

Sweeney and his partners, a group of serial entrepreneurs, have plowed more than $50 million into iCreditWorks since its 2019 founding, he said. That has helped Sweeney snap up banking veterans including Suresh Nair, who serves as chief information technology officer. Nair was a senior technology officer at Bank of America and helped engineer Merrill Lynch’s trading platform.

The company recently hired Truist Financial to raise its first round of outside funding, seeking $50 million at a roughly $200 million valuation, Sweeney said.