Goldman Sachs is merging its retail and health-care investment-banking groups amid a boom in pharmaceutical deals.

Kathy Elsesser and Francois-Xavier de Mallmann, co-heads of the retail team, will lead the new group with Marshall Smith, head of the health-care unit, according to an internal memo.

David Wells, a spokesman for New York-based Goldman Sachs, confirmed the contents of the memo. Goldman Sachs is the top-ranked adviser this year on deals involving health-care companies, which this quarter announced about $200 billion of deals, the most ever, according to recent data.

The firm ranked second for retail deals, behind Morgan Stanley, the data show. The change will allow bankers to “be deployed more widely across a broader client base,” Goldman Sachs’s co-heads of investment banking, Richard J Gnodde, David Solomon and John S Weinberg, wrote in the memo.

“We see growing convergence between sub sectors.” Bloomberg