Meet Goldman’s athlete whisperer: the woman who stands guard against $1 billion of fraud targeting sports fortunes
When a star athlete gets their jersey retired, Nicole Pullen Ross might be in the room. Not as a family member, not as a fan—but as a trusted financial advisor who helped make sure the wealth that came with the career didn’t disappear before the ceremony. “When a client has their jersey retired, that’s pretty cool,” said Pullen Ross, a Goldman Sachs partner who leads the firm’s Sports and Entertainment Solutions (SES) business within its Private Wealth Management division. “To be there and experience that with the client and their family … Nobody really gets to see the success in a way that we get to see the success and the failures.” It’s a rare perch, and one she’s earned over nearly three decades at one of Wall Street’s most storied institutions. With the NFL Draft just concluded and a new class of young millionaires entering the league, the stakes of her work have never felt more urgent. But Pullen Ross is quick to remind Fortune in conversation: the games themselves are just one chapter of a much bigger story. A billion-dollar problem According to research cited by Pullen Ross, athletes lost nearly $974 million to fraud over a 10-year period ending in 2024, and the pace is accelerating. “Over the past six years, 40% of that loss has occurred,” she said, citing a recent study by EY. “The ability to really have a strategy that includes risk management, whether it relates to cyber threats or physical security, is increasingly important.” It’s precisely the kind of problem that prompted Goldman Sachs to formally launch SES in 2018, when Pullen Ross and her team saw a gap in the market. The firm had long served wealthy clients — tech founders, family offices, business owners—and this included athletes but Goldman formalized the unit to address athletes’ unique wealth planning and investment needs, particularly a rather compressed financial timeline. “If you