What is goldman sachs fiscal year?

In February 2023, we took another step on our journey when we held our second Investor Day, and as I said then, it has certainly been an interesting three years. Back in January 2020, nobody would have imagined that just a few weeks later a pandemic would break out and there would be such disruption in the global economy. Even today, we’re operating in an uncertain environment. The war in Ukraine has roiled energy markets, and an increase in inflation has triggered monetary tightening.

But through it all, we’ve stayed focused on shareholders, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. Since our first Investor Day, our total shareholder return is 60 percent, outperforming our peer average meaningfully.1 Our book value per share is up by nearly 40 percent, roughly twice that of our closest competitor.1 Our earnings per share is up by over 40 percent. We’ve returned nearly $18 billion in capital to common shareholders. And our average returns over the past three years are in line with our current targets of 14–16 percent return on equity (ROE) and 15–17 percent return on tangible equity (ROTE).2

When you look at our 2022 results specifically, there’s no question that the operating environment was challenging. The same business mix that did so well in 2021 faced headwinds, such as low capital markets issuance activity and falling equity and fixed income asset prices. At the same time, we continued to make strategic investments in our acquisitions and technology that, though important to the firm’s longterm strength, weighed on our financial performance in the short run.

Despite those difficulties, we delivered for shareholders in 2022. Net revenues were $47.4 billion, net earnings were $11.3 billion and diluted earnings per common share were $30.06. ROE was 10.2 percent and ROTE2 was 11.0 percent. We also grew our book value per share by 6.7 percent and continued to make significant progress on our strategic evolution. As a result, in a macro environment where equity issuance hit a nearly two-decade low, we performed better than we would have three years ago.

In the pages that follow, we lay out in detail the state of our franchise as well as the progress we’ve made in our businesses, and as you’ll see, our strategy is a reflection of our purpose: We aspire to be the world’s most exceptional financial institution, united by our core values of partnership, client service, integrity and excellence. Being exceptional is not a given, but we always learn and adapt. We are constantly focused on outperforming for our clients.

And what’s most exceptional about our firm is our people. As I travel around the world meeting with clients, I’m often told how talented our people are. We couldn’t have anticipated all the challenges we’d face over the past three years, and yet our people met them all with hard work, creativity and determination. I’m grateful to call them my colleagues. I’m also fortunate to work with a leadership team that is laser-focused on executing our strategy: our president and chief operating officer, John Waldron; our chief financial officer, Denis Coleman; and our entire Management Committee.

The path ahead is never certain, and there will be plenty of challenges along the way, but we head into 2023 energized, excited and determined to deliver for shareholders.

At the heart of our strategy is a focus on clients. We believe that serving our clients exceptionally well will both strengthen our franchise and deliver returns for our shareholders. As a result, in 2019, we started a pilot program that we believed would help demonstrate that commitment: One Goldman Sachs.

One Goldman Sachs is now the organizational philosophy that underpins how we cover our clients in an increasingly complex world. It puts clients at the center of everything we do. It brings to bear our intellectual capital and expertise across all our businesses to serve our global client franchise in a more integrated and comprehensive manner.

Today, we have partners who are responsible for owning the entire firmwide relationship with One Goldman Sachs clients, and as part of that, they are responsible for building dedicated teams that bring together the relevant experts and thought leaders across the firm to serve the client. One Goldman Sachs is highly accretive to multiple parts of our business and, more importantly, it’s highly accretive to our clients, who get the best of Goldman Sachs. One Goldman Sachs has expanded beyond a pilot program. We believe this ethos is applicable and extensible to a much broader set of clients.

In December 2022, building off our renewed commitment to client centricity, we reorganized the firm into three segments: 1) Global Banking & Markets; 2) Asset & Wealth Management; and 3) Platform Solutions, into which we have integrated two lines of businesses: Transaction banking and Consumer platforms, which consists of our consumer card partnerships and GreenSky. We saw this as the logical next step in our strategic journey to building a more durable firm that generates higher returns through the cycle.

We are now reporting our results under our new structure, and we have also announced three key execution priorities: 1) maximizing wallet share and growing financing activities in GBM; 2) growing management and other fees in AWM; and 3) scaling Platform Solutions to deliver profitability. We believe we’re now well positioned to execute our strategy, capitalize on our strengths and achieve our execution priorities in all three of our segments.

Global Banking & Markets

Global Banking & Markets is an extraordinary franchise. We’ve been #1 in global completed M&A for 23 of the last 24 years,3 and once again this year we were the advisor of choice. We were also #2 in equity and equity-related underwriting as well as in high-yield debt underwriting.

And yet, over the past three years, we’ve seen significant growth. We’ve increased wallet share by 370 basis points.4 We’ve increased our financing activities in FICC and Equities at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to more than $7 billion in net revenues for 2022. And we’re now ranked in the top 3 with 77 of the top 100 institutional clients across FICC and Equities, up from a base of 51 at our first Investor Day.5 We had a very good business and we’ve made it better.

In 2022, GBM generated revenues of $32.5 billion, a 12 percent decline from 2021, as significantly higher FICC net revenues were more than offset by a steep decline in Investment banking fees. Advisory net revenues, however, were $4.7 billion, the second highest in our history.

Asset & Wealth Management

In Asset & Wealth Management, we’ve taken several disparate businesses inside the firm and combined them into one powerful platform. Today, we are a top 5 global active asset manager6 and a top 5 global alternatives manager6 with a premier wealth management franchise. We now have more than $2.5 trillion in assets under supervision (AUS).

We had a record year in alternatives fundraising in 2022, with $72 billion raised across our franchise. Overall, we’ve raised nearly $180 billion since 2019, making real progress toward our revised target of $225 billion. Of that $72 billion in alternatives, $27 billion came through our wealth platform. And we now have loan penetration7 with approximately 30 percent of our U.S. private wealth clients, leaving us plenty of room for growth. Our total client assets8 in Wealth management stand at more than $1 trillion.

In 2022, our Asset & Wealth Management business generated net revenues of $13.4 billion, a 39 percent decline from 2021. A steep drop in the net revenues related to Equity and Debt investments offset an additional $1 billion of Management and other fees and a strong increase in Private banking and lending net revenues. Full-year Management and other fees were $8.8 billion, putting us well on track to hit our 2024 target of more than $10 billion.

Platform Solutions

In 2022, we decided to significantly narrow our ambitions for our consumer strategy.

Now we have a smaller set of emerging businesses. We are working to drive them to profitability, and we’re also considering strategic alternatives for our Consumer platforms.

Total operating expenses for the year were $31.2 billion, down by 2 percent from 2021. Compensation and benefits expenses fell by 15 percent, despite a 10 percent increase in headcount, and were largely offset by higher non-compensation expenses. The increase in non-compensation expenses was primarily related to acquisitions, transaction-based costs and continued investments in technology. In addition, client-related market development costs were higher following lower levels during the pandemic. We remain highly focused on operating efficiency. We are actively engaged in expense mitigation efforts as we look to appropriately calibrate the firm for the operating environment.

Our balance sheet ended the year at $1.4 trillion, down by $114 billion versus the third quarter and relatively flat year over year as we focused on actively managing our resources. Deposits ended the year at $387 billion, up by approximately $23 billion year over year, reflecting growth in private bank and consumer deposits and transaction banking deposits. At the end of the fourth quarter, our standardized CET1 ratio was 15.0 percent, up by 80 basis points year over year. This represents a 120-basispoint buffer to our new capital requirement of 13.8 percent in the beginning of 2023. We returned $6.7 billion to common shareholders, including common stock repurchases of $3.5 billion and common stock dividends of $3.2 billion.

We believe our strategy positions us well to meet our financial targets through the cycle. And, while in tougher environments we may not hit our return targets, our actions over the past several years have raised the floor of our returns, while retaining the upside in more conducive markets and lowering the overall volatility. Across all our businesses, we are focused on the forward.

The integration of our #1 Investment Banking franchise9 with our leading FICC and Equities businesses positions Global Banking & Markets to continue delivering strong returns. Now we are focused on capturing share, particularly in favorable environments, while maintaining resource discipline. The size, breadth and diversity of our mix of activities have made revenues relatively stable over time. Our share gains and higher financing revenues over the past few years have further increased durability. This is a great business, and we are performing for clients at the highest level.

In Asset & Wealth Management, our franchise benefits from the Goldman Sachs ecosystem that gives clients access to a wide breadth of products and solutions as well as our unique market insight and expertise. We’re focused on investment performance and client experience to drive a more durable revenue stream from fees and Private banking and lending. We are keeping ourselves accountable with our new medium-term targets on revenue growth, margin and ROE. This is the area where there is the most significant growth opportunity for us, and where we are already operating at scale.

And in Platform Solutions, though this segment remains small in the context of the broader firm, we see potential in these emerging platforms. We believe these are attractive businesses that provide stable, more recurring revenue derived from net interest income and fees, and we offer innovative, tech-forward products for our end customers.

Firmwide, we remain committed to delivering on our financial targets, and we are confident in our ability to do so, given the underlying strength of our franchise. In the past three years, our average ROE was 14.8 percent. This was in line with our targets and 320 basis points higher than the peer10 average. And, if you exclude the impact of litigation in 2020, our average ROE would have been roughly 130 basis points higher.

As we look ahead, we are committed to making the firm more transparent and accountable to shareholders. This is just as important to us as our business level targets. We’ve made a conscious effort to be open and accessible, with enhanced disclosures, more frequent investor conferences and regular strategic updates. We’ve continued to lay out targets for our firm and our businesses, and we’ve provided robust disclosure of key performance indicators to measure our progress.

We’ve also made important changes to better align employee incentives. All our Management Committee members receive 100 percent of their annual stock-based compensation in performance-based shares that are earned based on future results. This is intended specifically to enhance collaboration and align our entire leadership team with long-term shareholder value creation. Beyond that, many of our employees are shareholders as well. We are united in driving shareholder value.

We returned $6.7 billion to common shareholders

In addition to serving our clients and delivering for shareholders, we’re also focused on taking care of our people. We have a longstanding commitment to recruiting, developing and promoting the best talent available with the widest range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We have made headway with our diverse representation goals at the analyst, associate and vice president levels. We were proud that our 2022 partner class was the most diverse to date. That said, we still have much work to do to build and retain a pipeline of diverse leadership.

We’re also continuing our long tradition of investing in our communities.

In 2023, we mark the 15th anniversary of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, our ongoing initiative to foster economic growth by providing women entrepreneurs around the world with a business and management education and access to capital. The 10,000 Women in-person business education program was launched in 2008, and in 2018, the curriculum was made available online through Coursera, further democratizing access. In 2014, in partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), 10,000 Women launched a first-of-its-kind global finance facility, the Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility, to enable access to capital for more women entrepreneurs. As of March 2023, the facility had reached more than 164,000 women entrepreneurs, eclipsing the 100,000 target set when the initiative was launched, and contributing to an over $4.5 billion increase in the volume of loans on-lent by financial institutions to women-owned businesses. Overall, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women has reached more than 200,000 women from over 150 countries.

Building on what we learned from 10,000 Women, in 2009 we launched our signature entrepreneurship initiative, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses. Today, the program has served more than 13,600 small businesses in all 50 states through our education program, and it has also partnered with select Community Development Financial Institutions to provide loans to small businesses. In 2020, we launched a new advocacy initiative, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Voices, to help small business owners in the U.S. advocate for policy changes that matter to them. In July 2022, we brought together more than 2,500 entrepreneurs at our summit in Washington, D.C. — the largest gathering of its kind — to hear from top business leaders, devise new strategies for business growth and meet with more than 300 members of Congress to call for policy action, specifically to modernize and reauthorize the Small Business Administration for the first time in more than 20 years.

In 2021, we took what we had learned from both programs to launch our latest initiative, One Million Black Women. In the first two years, we’ve already seen progress and firmwide engagement. We’ve committed more than $1 billion of investment capital and more than $20 million in grant capital to 116 organizations, companies and projects, which puts us on track to directly impact the lives of more than 184,000 Black women and girls. Some examples include a growth equity investment in CareAcademy, a Black woman–led upskilling company; our Alternative Investment Management Black Equity Opportunities fund; and our people serving as executive coaches to Black women school principals through our partnership with New Leaders. From our experience, and with the guidance of our Advisory Council, we’ve learned that what we need most — more than good ideas — are partners. Only by combining our efforts can we hope to transform the economy we leave behind for the next generation.

Another area where we’ve long been focused is sustainability. We have been a leading voice in the financial services industry addressing climate change and other critical environmental challenges going back to 2005, when we established our Environmental Policy Framework. In 2019, we set a target of $750 billion in financing, advisory and investing activity over the next 10 years across the themes of climate transition and inclusive growth. We have achieved approximately 55 percent of our target in three years. By connecting our experience as a financial institution with the insights gained through our work with clients and partners and our ongoing engagement with the public sector, we are enabling capital to move toward solutions that will help clients not only adapt but also take ownership to drive the transition to a low-carbon economy. At the same time, we cannot address market gaps at scale on our own, so we continue to identify strategic partners whose strengths and areas of focus complement our own.

When you look at our strategy, our culture, our talent and our track record, I think we’re incredibly well positioned to serve our clients. We are stewards of their trust — a trust that has been built up over a very long period of time. Goldman Sachs has a deep history of working with clients who have had a huge impact on the world, and we work hard to uphold that tradition of exceptional client service every day.

As we go forward, we are focused on the success of our clients and our franchise so we can deliver for shareholders. We’re working hard to raise the floor on returns and achieve our through-the-cycle targets. Our leadership is focused on our key priorities to make the firm stronger and more diversified. And I believe if we stay true to our core values, our strategy and our people, the best days for Goldman Sachs are yet to come.

When does your fiscal year end? Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

• 2021. $59.34 billion. 2021. $21.64 billion.
• 2021. $59.45. 4Q21. $12.64 billion.
• 4Q21. $3.94 billion. 4Q21. $10.81.

Net revenues were $59.34 billion, net earnings were $21.64 billion and diluted earnings per common share was $59.45 — all records. Return on average common shareholders’ equity (ROE) was 23.0 percent, the highest since 2007, and return on average tangible common shareholders’ equity (ROTE)1 was 24.3 percent.

It’s true the surge in capital markets activity was a big tailwind. The economy continued to recover from the short but severe recession that marked the pandemic’s early days, and the robust growth that followed put enormous pressure on supply chains, leading to levels of inflation not seen in decades. By year end, rate hikes were widely expected and markets entered a new period of uncertainty.

We don’t expect 2022 to look like 2021, especially as monetary policy tightens and fiscal policy becomes less supportive. But our confidence is as strong as it’s ever been that our strategy is working and that we can help our clients navigate whatever the future holds.

As we move into 2022, I want to thank the people of Goldman Sachs. Their hard work, dedication, creativity and resilience continue to drive our success. Everywhere I go, when I meet with clients, they talk about the caliber and commitment of our people. As many of our teams have returned to our offices around the world, we have had a chance to reconnect and rediscover what makes Goldman Sachs such an extraordinary firm — in particular our exceptional talent and our collaborative culture.

Progress is by no means a straight line, and we are staying nimble as we continue to bring our people together as much as possible. But we believe it’s important that the next generation of Goldman Sachs colleagues — many of whom are early in their careers — experience our apprenticeship culture firsthand as we work together to serve our clients.

Building on the enormous progress we have made, I look forward to all that we will accomplish together in the year ahead. It is a great privilege to lead this remarkable organization, and I couldn’t be more grateful to our leadership team: our president and chief operating officer, John Waldron; our former chief financial officer (CFO), Stephen Scherr; our new CFO, Denis Coleman; and our entire Management Committee.

Unlocking the power of our franchise for our clients is not only driving growth in our core businesses, but also allowing new initiatives to scale and in the years ahead, we will continue to drive returns for our shareholders.

In 2021, all four of our business segments saw revenue growth year over year. Investment Banking generated record net revenues of $14.88 billion and ranked #1 in worldwide announced and completed M&A, equity and equity-related offerings, common stock offerings and IPOs.2 Global Markets net revenues of $22.08 billion were the highest in 12 years. Asset Management generated record net revenues of $14.92 billion; with $2.5 trillion in firmwide assets under supervision (AUS), we are one of the largest active asset managers in the world. And Consumer & Wealth Management generated record net revenues of $7.47 billion, with over $1 trillion in total client assets.3

We believe book-value growth underpins the long-term value of any large, diversified financial institution and, in last year’s somewhat unique operating environment, we were able to grow our book value per common share by 20.4 percent to $284.39. And though some of our businesses are more cyclical than others, we believe we can deliver returns for our shareholders in almost any environment.

In January 2020, we laid out our three-part strategic plan: We were going to 1) grow and strengthen our existing businesses; 2) diversify our products and services; and 3) operate our firm more efficiently, all in an effort to produce higher, more consistent returns. And though the market environment since then has looked nothing like what we expected, we’ve done very well: Today, we’re tracking more than 30 key performance indicators and we believe we will meet or exceed 95 percent of them.

Key to our success has been a renewed focus on clients. Through our One Goldman Sachs initiative, we are unlocking the power of our franchise by providing more comprehensive and integrated service while also using our network of clients to support our growth. For instance, over 90 percent of the clients on our Transaction banking platform already had relationships with the firm. Our progress confirms one of our core beliefs: that if you really take care of your clients, if you invest in those relationships and if you build trust over a long period of time, good things will happen.

Confident in our strategy, we recently unveiled an updated set of financial targets. In the medium term,4 we believe we can achieve an ROE of 14–16 percent and an ROTE of 15–17 percent. We also reaffirmed our target efficiency ratio of approximately 60 percent. In addition, we announced that our target is to maintain our Common Equity Tier 1 capital ratio equal to the regulatory requirements plus a buffer of 50 to 100 basis points.

In addition to our firmwide targets, we unveiled an updated set of business-level targets tied to our growth strategy. Our new targets are $350 billion in organic, traditional, long-term fee-based AUS net inflows over the period from 2020 to 2024;5 $225 billion in gross alternatives fundraising over that same period; more than $10 billion in firmwide management and other fees in 2024, including more than $2 billion from alternative AUS; approximately $750 million in net revenues in Transaction banking in 2024; and over $4 billion in net revenues in Consumer banking in 2024.

Our four segments create a very powerful ecosystem, and in 2021 they continued to grow.

Investment Banking We’ve been #1 in global completed M&A for 22 of the past 23 years and, in 2021, we were once again the advisor of choice. Net revenues were 58 percent higher than in 2020, driven by record net revenues in both Financial advisory and Underwriting. Corporate lending net revenues were significantly higher as well. In the past two years, we’ve grown our wallet share by approximately 350 basis points6 and we still see ample room for growth: Our backlog was already high, but during 2021, it grew even more, putting us in a strong position for 2022.

Global Markets Although market volatility declined in 2021, our clients continued to rely on us for risk management, financial intermediation and, increasingly, financing. Net revenues grew by 4 percent to $22.08 billion. In Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC), net revenues declined, but in Equities they grew by 20 percent. Since 2019, we’ve grown wallet share by approximately 250 basis points.7 We’re in the top 3 with 72 of the 100 top institutional clients, up from 51 just two years ago.8 We also ended the year with record average balances in our prime services business.

Asset Management Net revenues grew by 87 percent, fueled by significantly higher net revenues in Equity investments and Lending and debt investments. Incentive fees rose, and Management and other fees were a record, reflecting higher average AUS. Growing these durable fees is an area of strategic focus. And in August 2021, we announced that we would acquire leading European asset manager NN Investment Partners (NNIP) in early 2022. NNIP’s world-class ESG capabilities and strong footprint in Europe will help us further strengthen what is already one of the leading asset management businesses in the world.

Consumer & Wealth Management We continue to empower our millions of clients and customers around the world to reach their financial goals. In 2021, net revenues grew by 25 percent to $7.47 billion. Net revenues in Wealth Management grew by 25 percent to a record $5.98 billion, fueled by higher average AUS, increased client demand for alternative investments and significantly higher net revenues in Private banking and lending. In Consumer banking, net revenues grew by 23 percent to a record $1.49 billion, reflecting higher credit card and deposit balances.

In 2021, we made good progress on our growth initiatives. In many instances, we met our medium-term goals ahead of schedule.

Transaction Banking I hear from clients constantly that our innovative cloud-based Transaction banking platform is a differentiator. We expanded to the U.K. in June 2021 and, today, we have approximately 350 corporate clients. To extend the platform’s reach, we’ve formed partnerships with American Express, Fiserv, Stripe and Visa; and less than two years in, we have already surpassed our previous five-year-plus target of $50 billion in deposits. Now our target for 2024 is to exceed $100 billion in deposits. Our progress has reinforced our confidence that we can serve this very large addressable market, and we believe it will be accretive to our ROE at scale.

Alternatives Today, we are one of the top 5 alternative asset managers in the world.9 In 2021, we raised $67 billion in third-party capital across a diverse array of asset classes, including private equity, private credit, growth equity and real estate. That brings us to a total of $107 billion, over two-thirds of our previous five-year goal of $150 billion. As a result, we have set a new target for 2024 of $225 billion in gross alternatives fundraising. We’ve also made significant progress in harvesting our on-balance equity investments over the past two years, with roughly $12 billion in net dispositions since year-end 2019.

Wealth Management We deliver a world-class, tailored wealth management offering to individuals, families, family offices and nonprofit institutions. In 2021, we had strong long-term fee-based AUS net inflows and continued to expand our global footprint. Our Wealth Management business comprises our premier Private Wealth Management business and our Personal Financial Management Group, which includes Ayco and Personal Financial Management (previously United Capital). Through Ayco we provide a wide variety of workplace solutions for 475 companies to a broad set of our corporate clients’ employees, personalized planning and advisory services for senior executives, as well as full-service, bespoke wealth management solutions for the C-suite.

Digital Consumer Banking This year, we celebrated the five-year anniversary of our digital consumer banking platform, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and in that time, we’ve made enormous progress. Our Consumer business has grown to serve more than 10 million customers and $110 billion in deposits, and it is putting our customers at the center of everything we do, signified by winning several significant industry awards and recognitions from J.D. Power, Which? Awards and more. In September 2021, we announced an agreement to acquire GreenSky, the largest fintech platform for home improvement consumer loan originations, whose growing network of over 10,000 merchants will allow us to meet more customers where they transact. We launched critical product releases and features in 2021, including the Marcus app on the iOS app store in the U.K. and Apple Card Family Plan, and we launched the My GM Rewards Card in January 2022. We also look forward to launching our digital checking product in 2022, which will allow us to become the primary bank for our customers.

In 2021, operating expenses were $31.94 billion, 10 percent higher than in 2020, primarily because we increased our people’s compensation to reward their exceptional performance. While compensation and benefits expenses were up by 33 percent, our 2021 compensation ratio net of provision for credit losses declined by 210 basis points from the prior year. It’s important to note that when this firm went public in 1999, this ratio was over 50 percent. Since then, it has decreased by more than 20 percentage points. However, it is not as relevant a metric as it was before, as we are aiming for a 60 percent efficiency ratio target, and we’re managing both our compensation and non-compensation expenses fluidly.

We are a pay-for-performance culture; we reward our people who drive our growth. But we have a shareholder-aligned compensation framework that relies heavily on equity awards to incentivize long-term value creation, and that compensation can be adjusted when performance is not as robust.

Since January 2020, we have achieved approximately $1 billion of our planned $1.3 billion in annual run-rate expense efficiencies, and we expect to achieve the rest later this year. We have a flexible cost structure that enables us to make investments and support returns, including disciplined expense management, a focus on platforms and digitization, and a priority list of investment spending.

This year showed how important engineering and technology will be to the future of Goldman Sachs. In 2021, we expanded our fully cloud-based digital businesses and features, including Apple Card Family Plan, My GM Rewards Card and Transaction banking. We also created a series of foundational cloud-based Developer platforms on which our businesses and our clients can easily build new applications. One of our most exciting announcements came in November, when we launched Financial Cloud Data at AWS re:Invent. This platform will offer GS Data and Analytics tools in the cloud to help developers build data-driven applications. And to support all these new offerings, we continue to strengthen the team by recruiting world-class engineering talent.

Goldman Sachs has long been known for the quality of its people, and our exceptional results in 2021 made clear just how differentiated they are. We have an abundance of talent, no doubt, but beyond that, we also have a distinctly collaborative culture, which we have worked hard to preserve over the course of the pandemic. We have welcomed thousands of new people to our firm in the past few years, and it was important to us that they experience firsthand what it’s like to build a career at Goldman Sachs. They are at a moment in their careers when learning from their team members and developing a network are crucial to their professional growth. And working together in person makes it far easier for us to pass on our core values of partnership, excellence, client service and integrity.

Our people’s health and safety are our top priority, and while we are adapting our plans to the specific needs of each office location, we continue to make progress in bringing our people back together as much as safely possible. We will always give our people the flexibility they need to manage their lives, but throughout 2021, our experience showed that we are stronger when we’re together, and protecting and enhancing our culture will remain a focus for us as we enter 2022.

In 2021, sustainability continued to gain momentum in the economy at large and, at Goldman Sachs, we made further progress toward our goal of supporting $750 billion in sustainable financing, investing and advisory activity by 2030. By year end, we had achieved approximately $300 billion of our goal, including $167 billion in climate transition, $50 billion in inclusive growth and the remainder in multiple themes, reflecting our clients’ need for advice, capital and tools to support their sustainability goals.

In March 2021, we announced a commitment to align our financing activities with a net zero by 2050 pathway and unveiled interim business goals for three industries — oil and gas, power, and auto manufacturing — in our second annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, Accelerating Transition. As a financial institution, we believe the most meaningful role we can play in the global climate transition is to drive decarbonization in the real economy in partnership with our clients. This requires growing our commercial capabilities and investing in innovation. We also need reliable data, so we are working with corporate partners to develop a free, open source platform for climate-related data and to equip our clients with new impact-measuring tools, like our Carbon Portfolio Analytics in Marquee.

Still, we will not succeed in our effort unless the public and private sector work together. Financial institutions like ours need to direct capital to sustainable solutions in emerging markets. That’s why we’ve partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies to launch a Climate Innovation Fund that will encourage public and private investment in clean energy projects across South and Southeast Asia. We also need thoughtful public policy that strikes a balance between current energy capabilities and support for new technology, as well as concrete measures that will accelerate a just and orderly transition. After all, that’s what this is: a transition. We recognize the need to build a more sustainable planet, and we’re doing our part to help the world get there.

Advancing diversity and inclusion is a top priority of mine. In 2021, we continued to make progress promoting change both in the world at large and within the firm. In July 2021, we strengthened our board diversity requirement. We will now underwrite IPOs for companies in Western Europe and the U.S. only if they have at least two diverse board members, at least one of whom must be a woman. We also advanced progress on closing the opportunity gap through our investment and philanthropic efforts, such as the One Million Black Women initiative. In addition, we made headway with our hiring goals at the analyst, associate and vice president levels, and our 2021 managing director class was the most diverse to date. That said, we still have much work to do to build and retain a pipeline of diverse leadership, and we are hiring additional diversity recruiters, as well as expanding our sponsorship and development programs for diverse talent at the firm.

In March 2021, we launched our newest initiative, One Million Black Women, with the goal of investing $10 billion to improve the lives of at least 1 million Black women by 2030. Since then we’ve made investments and grants laying the groundwork to directly impact the lives of over 98,000 women across the country. In direct response to input received from nearly 20,000 Black women and girls, we recently announced two new programs, OMBW Black in Business, focused on Black women sole proprietors, and OMBW Black Women Impact Grants, focused on access to multiyear funding for Black women nonprofit leaders. In addition, for the first time we will be providing capital for microloans through a new partnership with Grameen. Vital to this work has been our exceptional Advisory Council, which includes prominent Black leaders like Roz Brewer, CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance; Dr. Ruth Simmons, the president of Prairie View A&M University; Melanie Campbell, the president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation; and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

After having served more than 12,300 small businesses in all 50 states through our education program, our signature entrepreneurship initiative, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, continues to expand. In September 2021, we launched 10,000 Small Businesses Fellows, a pilot workforce program that pairs community college students in four cities with small business alums of the 10,000 Small Businesses education program for semester-long, paid internships fully funded by the Goldman Sachs Foundation. In addition, our new advocacy initiative, 10,000 Small Business Voices, spoke up for graduates of our education program and worked with the Biden administration to expand the COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and to reform the federal procurement process.

As we look forward to 2022, I want to thank our clients for putting their trust in us and our people for their extraordinary commitment to the firm. After a record year, we enter the next phase of our growth strategy in a strong position. Our strategic plan is working, our renewed focus on clients is strengthening our franchise and, as always, our people are second to none. We are investing in the future of Goldman Sachs and as a result, the firm will continue to evolve. We have a long-term track record of producing value for shareholders, our leadership team is focused on continuing that record and we are excited by the opportunity ahead.