the bar is set pretty low right now, maybe people are just better off running daily expenses through a stable company that isn't a traditional bank
Every normal company that gets into finance eventually pays the price. At some point, that nice, profitable finanical arm will go into distress and the company will attempt to bail it out with funds from other arms. This cycle will repeat until it either kills the company or the financial arm after it has sucked down more money than you can imagine.
Westinghouse and GE are more recent ones, but the list goes much further back.
Cupertino is also hosing Goldman in this relationship [1].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/16/apple-card-future-goldmans-sa...
Various sources:
$80 https://askwonder.com/research/average-customer-acquisition-...
> The short version is that it costs around $80 to acquire a customer who returns about $120 in profit.
https://medium.com/unifimoney/changing-the-vicious-cycle-of-...
> It costs on average around $200 to acquire a credit card customer in the US (up to and beyond $1,000 if they are affluent cards like MasterCard World Elite and Visa Infinite).
https://runningwithmiles.boardingarea.com/apple-card-custome...
> The Apple Card doesn’t need any affiliates or marketing yet analysts say that this new card has a customer acquisition cost of $350 and will take several years for Goldman Sachs to turn a profit on it.
---
So the corresponding part of that is "we spent a lot to get a lot of customers. If they remain loyal, then GS will have something quite profitable for a long time." Spending $350 per customer is more than the $200 mentioned... but also much less than the $1000 for high end cards (and the tales of Chase Sapphire Reserve).