The Block: Martin Chavez, Goldman Sachs' Global co-Head of Securities, is retiring

R. Martin Chavez, Goldman Sachs' co-Head of Securities is retiring from the investment bank, according to the Wall Street Journal. According to an internal memo, Chavez will retire at the end of the year after being with the firm for nearly 19 years. Chavez ran Goldman Sachs' trading business, which saw $2 billion in revenues during the second quarter of 2019. He joined the firm's commodities trading unit in 1993. In 2005, Chavez took on a role as managing director of Goldman's Investment Banking Division Strategies. A year later, he became a Goldman Sachs partner.

Chavez, who is known as one of the most senior technologists on Wall Street, previously held other C-suite positions at the Wall Street bank, including CIO and CFO. He spearheaded a number of efforts at the firm, including its foray into APIs via its Marquee platform. In his last public podcast interview as a Goldman exec, Chavez told The Block's Frank Chaparro that Wall Street would be built around APIs, noting: "The whole financial ecosystem is re-inventing and re-architecting itself around API boundaries and the new question that matters hugely is where are you going to be the best producer? One of the very few best producers of some service that’s encapsulated by an API and in every other place you probably need to be an astute consumer of an API service produced by somebody else. Anybody who’s not doing that is going to be missing the biggest and most important technological change. That’s the big picture." Chavez did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.