Ryad Yousuf first Bangladeshi partner of Goldman Sachs

Ryad Yousuf, a Bangladesh-born banker in London, has become one of the partners of Goldman Sachs, the elite American multinational investment bank and financial services company.

He is the first person from Bangladesh to become a partner at the bank, insiders told UK-based Financial News and also confirmed by a bank spokesperson.

Yousuf is co-head of emerging markets sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Goldman, having joined as a managing director at Deutsche Bank in 2011, where he was head of its emerging markets rates structuring team.

His parents were both teachers and, growing up in Bangladesh, he later moved to Texas in the US when he was 16 after his father was offered a research secondment.

He then looked to apply to US universities as part of an effort to emigrate to the west and kick-start his career, eventually getting a place at Bates College in Maine, studying math and physics.

While his tuition fees were paid through a scholarship, he also had a job that required 20-hours a week to pay for “everything else”.

“In my third year, somebody came to me and said ‘hey, there’s this job in New York city that pays $10,000 for the summer, are you interested?’. I didn’t even ask what the job was,” he told Financial News.

“I was heavily in debt, I hadn’t seen my parents for four years and wanted to afford to go home, so I interviewed and got the job at Merrill Lynch.” Through the summer internship, Yousef secured a full-time job on the bond trading floor at Merrill Lynch in 1999, when the bank was a leading fixed income house and trading revenue was booming.

“From a cultural perspective, banking is not something Bangladeshi people aspire towards,” he said. “So you want to be a doctor, you want to be a lawyer, an engineer or a professor, but banking is not what your parents will inspire kids to be.”