After twenty years at Goldman Sachs, Neema Raphael tells Computer Weekly about his tech journey at one of many world’s largest banks
By
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Karl Flinders,
Chief reporter and senior editor EMEA
Published: 31 Jul 2023
Neema Raphael left San Francisco in 2003, and headed to New York to use his tech know-how to the enterprise sector. He quickly landed a job at Goldman Sachs, and inside 5 years, the self-confessed “tech nerd”, who knew nothing in regards to the finance sector, was a part of a workforce serving to the banking large survive one of many largest crises it has ever confronted.
Raphael says he’s a “Californian kid” who grew up in Los Angeles and accomplished his undergraduate tech training on the University of California in Berkeley.
After graduating in laptop science in 2003, he instantly headed to New York, the place he joined Goldman Sachs for what he describes as his first and solely job. “I was studying computer science, which I love as I am a tech nerd, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do pure tech for tech, and I wanted to learn something knew,” says Raphael.
He says he knew nothing in regards to the finance sector, however had accomplished a few internships at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. “The finance sector seemed a like a cool way to marry my tech skills with a new domain,” says Raphael.
After interviews at Goldman Sachs in New York, he says he was “totally sold” on the thought. Raphael was 22 12 months previous, and started his journey as a pc programming analyst, the place he coded back-office accounting techniques.
But it was in 2008 that he actually lower his enamel, within the financial institution’s IT division. “The financial crisis hit and people were actually worried about whether the firm would [continue to] exist,” he says. This was simply after the collapse of funding financial institution Lehman Brothers.
Raphael tells Computer Weekly: “There were a few groups that came together from different parts of the firm to try to bring company data together. Data about our exposure to Lehman Brothers, about how our business is running, our daily risk to get a more holistic view of how the firm was doing and our exposure. I was put into this sort of swat team building a database.”
Award win
The database, often known as Cptyr, received a prestigious award on the financial institution. Raphael says this was uncommon as a result of it might usually go to the very best banking or gross sales transaction moderately than an IT venture. “The database won the award,” he jokes.
The first iteration of the database took weeks, nevertheless it continued to be developed to assist the enterprise. “The database not only helped save the company but became a business driver,” says Raphael. Different elements of the Goldman Sachs enterprise, together with salespeople, merchants, and quants started to strategy the workforce to search out out extra in regards to the database that brings collectively all of the data they want in a single place. “This is where my data focus and passion came in,” he provides.
Goldman Sachs has three enterprise arms: funding banking and gross sales and buying and selling, asset/wealth administration and personal wealth, and a 3rd enterprise often known as Platform Solutions, which focuses on fintech and digital transactions.
Raphael’s present position, which experiences into the chief expertise officer, covers all three. Each enterprise line has its personal engineers who’re supported by his “horizontal team”, which builds platforms for all enterprise verticals. The workforce is made up of about 500 tech professionals out of Goldman Sachs’ complete tech workforce of 12,000, a couple of quarter of the corporate’s complete workers.
In his present position, Raphael says the largest problem is coping with the “explosion of data and what people want to do with it”.
“Finance has at all times been closely data pushed, however now it’s much more vital with machine studying, so my largest problem throughout the agency is organising data in a sane method that individuals can faucet into, and to ensure it may be used for issues like buying and selling, making choices and conferences rules.
“We have to make sure the data is organised, clean and high-quality, and make sure non-techies as well as techies can use it,” says Raphael, including that data on the financial institution is “medium-sized but highly complex”. “The complexity of our data is the challenge that makes it super interesting here, not the volume, as we are not a web scale company,” he says.
Data selection
Raphael says it’s the variability and linkages between data that creates challenges. “Even engineers here struggle with the variety and complexity of our data,” he says.
One main venture that Raphael’s workforce had been concerned in was the financial institution’s OneGS programme, which got down to purchasers that Goldman Sachs was one set of companies and salespeople moderately than being siloed. “This was a strategy to cover our clients holistically, but to do that on our side, we had to do a big data project to bring all client data together and organise it.”
OneGS was a two-year “data organisation, data normalisation and data curation project”, he says.
Another vital venture – accomplished not too long ago – which utilised data, has been “useful in the current financial crisis”, says Raphael.
“There was recently a lot of stress on the firms in the banking sector, so normalising the data on our exposure to these banks and what trades we had done with them was another project,” he says.
“This had to be done quickly, but Raphael says work has been done on this ever since the Cptyr database project was created in the 2008 financial crisis. “This was an upgraded version of the original Cptyr database,” he provides.
Raphael says that going ahead, there’s a “unique opportunity” for Goldman Sachs to deliver its tech prowess and put its hat within the fintech ring. “We have always been tech-forward, and now we can help our clients and customers bring the tech to bear for them,” he says.
For instance, Goldman Sachs has constructed a whole lot of the tech platform utilized by Apple Card.
In phrases of expertise initiatives of the longer term, Raphael speaks of transferring data to a multi-public cloud atmosphere to create “a single data infrastructure backbone for our analytics”. “As a company we have been moving to the cloud opportunistically, and there are pockets such as transaction banking, which is public cloud native, but we are at balance still heavily private cloud-based,” he says.
Raphael provides that the creation of a single public cloud-based data spine is a really massive, two to three-year venture that kicked off this 12 months.
The present financial challenges the world over and difficulties confronted by organisations has led to cutbacks in IT investments, however Goldman Sachs is continuous to speculate closely.
“The great thing about Goldman Sachs is that even in these super-challenging times, we invest in the right places and in where business and the world is going,” he says. “All the way in which to essentially the most senior individuals, they see the significance of not solely defending, however investing in engineering, automation synthetic intelligence and data.
“Relationships are a big part of our edge, but so too is technology and data,” concludes Raphael.
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…. to be continued
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