One recent afternoon at 200 West Street, Goldman Sachs partner Padi Raphael was walking a client toward the elevator at the bank’s New York headquarters when the doors opened. Out stepped Goldman’s chief data officer.
The timing couldn’t have been better. The client had been asking for the chance to meet him.
It also meant Padi was coming face-to-face with the coworker she calls her “best friend”: her brother.
What makes the moment at the elevator so unusual isn’t just that Padi and Neema Raphael are siblings. It’s that both have risen to become partners at Goldman, placing them among roughly 500 people at a firm of roughly 49,000.
They now steer parts of the firm that are essential to its future.
Padi, 47, is the global cohead of the third-party wealth business at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, having built her career in markets and client-facing roles across Europe and Asia. She’s center ring in a hot sector for the firm, working with broker-dealers, private banks, and investment advisors to attract more wealthy clients.
Courtesy of Goldman Sachs
Neema, 44, rose through the tech business and now leads hundreds of engineers who work on the bank’s data and AI systems. His role is central to Goldman’s push into artificial intelligence, a priority for CEO David Solomon.
“Our clients have a huge appetite for hearing his insights on all things data-related,” Padi told Business Insider in a joint interview with her brother. For years, she joked, Neema was known internally as Padi’s younger brother. Now, the shorthand has flipped.
The elevator encounter captured the unusual convergence of two careers that had spent decades running in parallel — for most of their time at Goldman, the siblings worked in different divisions and on different continents. Only recently did they begin showing up to the same office.
They shared with Business Insider an intimate look at how they navigated their rise.
From childhood to their first jobs
The Raphael siblings grew up in Los Angeles, the children of Iranian immigrants who emphasized the importance of education. Their parents collectively hold three master’s degrees and a Ph.D.
“We made education and learning a priority, and encouraged curiosity, reasoning, and discourse,” their parents, Nora Ghodsian and Bijan Raphael, said via email.
Growing up, neither imagined a career in financial services. Padi studied neuroscience at UCLA. Neema went on to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Padi arrived at Goldman first, almost by accident. A mentor encouraged her to talk to the firm, telling her it would teach her things she had yet to learn. She joined in 1999 as an analyst, after a hiring process she still remembers as grueling.
Courtesy of Goldman Sachs
“I’d fly in, do 12 interviews, and then fly back home,” Padi, who was still living on the West Coast at the time, said. The firm did this three times — more than 30 interviews in total — a process she later suspected was a test of endurance.
She spent her first year in New York in asset management before relocating to London in 2000, where she moved into equity derivatives sales on the trading floor and built a career there.
A few years later, her brother called.
Rising the ranks together
After college, Neema was keen to apply his tech training to a real-world business like Goldman. He asked his sister if she could help him get a foot in the door.
Padi couldn’t promise more than introductions, but agreed to circulate his résumé. She also offered advice: “Be yourself and be thoughtful and show them your work,” Neema recalled her telling him. He got the job, joining the technology division as an analyst in 2003.
Courtesy of Goldman Sachs
Five years later, at the height of the financial crisis, Neema’s team helped Goldman assess its exposure quickly because his team had helped digitize key systems. The effort earned an internal award typically reserved for dealmakers — and cemented his focus on the intersection of data and finance.
Early in his career, his manager asked if he would consider moving to Tokyo. Unsure what the request meant for his prospects at the bank, Neema called his sister. Her reaction was swift and definitive.
“You have to do that,” she told him. “That’s a no-brainer.”
Padi encouraged him, she said, because she believed that “any adventure, any opportunity to broaden your perspective about the world, about people, about the business” was worth taking.
While the siblings’ careers unfolded in very different parts of the firm, they continued comparing notes. Making partner was the next milestone.
Padi was named a partner in 2016. Her career had taken her from the equities trading floor during the Dot-com bust to returning from maternity leave during the recession, to navigating the European financial crisis in London, and to experiencing the coronavirus pandemic in Hong Kong.
Four years later, it was Neema’s turn. He became a partner in 2020, which Padi said marked the first year he was under consideration. The role brought a shift: greater visibility inside a firm where data and technology had become increasingly central.
Family now
In 2022, Padi moved back to New York after nearly a decade in Hong Kong.
“Coming back home to the US was a natural choice for our growing family,” she said. And it came as Solomon and his deputy, President and COO John Waldron, were combining Goldman’s asset and wealth management businesses. The two leaders were “seeking to reinforce our asset management business’ client leadership group with seasoned partners from around the firm,” she added.
For a stretch, Padi and her family stayed with Neema and his family. They often headed to the office together.
Outside work, the siblings’ closeness is unmistakable. Padi has three children — two teenagers and a kindergartener — while Neema is raising a young family, including a four-year-old and a newborn. Their kids are best friends, they said, and Friday nights are reserved for Shabbat dinners, with both families gathering to mark the end of the week together.
That dynamic was on display at Goldman’s annual winter gathering in Miami for its global partners, where the firm fills a wall with the names of every partner it has ever named. Like everyone else in attendance, the Raphael siblings went in search of theirs. A stylistic break in the display left Neema’s name at the end of one section, and Padi’s at the beginning of another.
They tracked both down and snapped selfies in front of each — a quiet marker of two careers that ran in parallel for two decades before converging at the top.
