Goldman Sachs unveils Amazon-backed cloud service for Wall Street

Goldman Sachs is getting into the cloud computing business.

The bank is opening up access to its trove of market data and software tools to hedge funds and asset managers in an offering designed with Amazon‘s cloud division, CNBC has learned exclusively.

The move, the result of a two-year collaboration with AWS, puts 152-year-old Goldman in the unusual position of being a provider of cloud services for Wall Street, according to executives at the two firms. It’s part of Goldman CEO David Solomon‘s push to use technology to better serve clients of the firm’s markets division, a trading juggernaut that has helped drive the firm’s results this year.

“Clients of the firm will get access to our decades of experience and data aggregation that should enable them to enhance their business decisions, both from a speed and efficiency perspective,” Solomon told CNBC last week in a phone interview. “We think that adds to our position as a leader in the marketplace.”

The new service, called GS Financial Cloud for Data with Amazon Web Services, will help asset managers save time by allowing their developers to focus efforts on trades, rather than spending time wrangling data sets and leaning on a patchwork of legacy software to analyze them, the companies said. It will also “lower the barriers to entry” for firms to use advanced quantitative trading techniques, Goldman said.  

The industry is struggling to keep up with the rising technological demands of the latest investment techniques, according to Goldman co-chief information officer Marco Argenti. The last decade has seen the rise of quantitative trading firms, which have soaked up assets while traditional hedge fund managers including John Paulson and Leon Cooperman have closed to outside investors.

A hedge fund client who wanted to chart the correlation between a stock and currency exchange rates, for instance, could take months to assemble and clean the data and perform calculations with it, said Argenti. Instead, by building applications atop data feeds and analytic tools that Goldman itself uses, the analysis can be done in minutes, he said.

“If this existed we would’ve used it, but we had to build it for ourselves because there really is nothing like this in the market,” Argenti said. “All you need to do is assemble the interface and integrate it with your application and then everything else is kind of taken care of for you.”

The product, which was unveiled Tuesday at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, is the latest sign of the unusually close ties between the tech giant and the leading Wall Street firm.

That relationship began more than a decade ago when Goldman began to port over parts of its computing workload to the cloud, according to Adam Selipsky, who…