Goldman Sachs' ex-pricing wizard might have made ~$100m after selling his fintech
There are few people bigger in the world of pricing technology than Kirat Singh. After playing a key role in building pricing systems across multiple major banks, Singh struck out on his own to build a fintech. That move now seems quite lucrative.
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Singh first rose to prominence by working on SecDB, the Goldman Sachs' pricing platform that gave the firm a competitive edge during the financial crisis. He wrote a derivatives pricing framework that he said was used across the bank. After that, he joined JPMorgan to build an FX and commodities trading system. Then, he joined Bank of America to build its own risk and pricing platform, Quartz.
Singh left banking to found risk management fintech Beacon Platform with Mark Higgins, an ex-JPMorgan MD who launched JPM's Athena platform. The startup was sold earlier this year for $560m to Clearwater Analytics. Singh has since joined the $6.8bn public company as its president of risk and alternatives. Higgins, meanwhile, says he has retired and taken up backgammon instead.
It's hard to say exactly how much Singh and Higgins made from the sale of Beacon. Much of the sum will have went towards buying shares owned by its investors; the fintech received backing from PIMCO and Barclays in its earliest funding rounds. The money will also presumably go towards buying out stock owned by Beacon employees. In its UK entity alone, Companies House accounts for 2023 revealed that Beacon had 52 employees with a collective 1.4m outstanding share options, each valued between $0.33 and $6.30. In the past, those employees included big names like ex-Goldman MD Michael Kirch, who was its chief commercial officer but ultimately left in 2018 to create "duality-dissolving sensual sculptures."
Still, Singh could have made hundreds of millions from the sale if we compare his situation to that of Nik Storonsky of Revolut. Reuters esimated last year that Storonsky's stake in his own company was ~17.8% of its total value. If Singh owned a similar amount of Beacon, he'd be taking home $99.6m as part of the acquisition. Not bad.
Singh isn't the first ex-Goldman guy to make millions from a fintech acquisition. James Blackham, a Goldman tech MD that worked on its Marquee platform, sold his InsurTech firm, By Miles, for an undisclosed amount in 2023. In what is a difficult market for fintech funding, more bankers in fintech may soon follow him and Singh down the acquisition route.
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