Phil Venables

CIS Board Member

Phil Venables is a member of the CIS Board of Directors. He is also a Senior Advisor to the firm and a Member of the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs Bank USA. As a Senior Advisor, he supports the firm’s executive leadership and client franchise on cybersecurity, technology risk, digital business risk, and operational resilience. In addition, Venables spearheads Goldman Sach’s work with industry associations and initiatives to reduce systemic risk. He is also a member of the Firmwide Enterprise Risk Committee, Firmwide Technology Risk Committee, and Global Business Resilience Committee.

Prior to becoming a Senior Advisor, Venables was a line executive and Chief Operational Risk Officer, and before that, the firm’s first Chief Information Security Officer and Head of Technology Risk, a role he held for 17 years. Venables joined Goldman Sachs as a Vice President in London in 2000, and then transferred to New York in 2001. Venables was named Managing Director in 2003, Partner in 2010, and Senior Advisor in 2019.

Prior to joining the Goldman Sachs, he was Chief Information Security Officer at Deutsche Bank and also functioned as the Global Head of Technology Risk Management for Standard Chartered Bank. Earlier in his career, Venables served in various technology, network management, and software engineering roles at a number of finance, energy, and defense organizations.

He serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council for Critical Infrastructure Protection, is

Co-chair of the Board of Sheltered Harbor, and is a Member of the board of New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Venables is also an Advisor to the cybersecurity efforts of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and serves on the Advisory Board to the Director of a U.S. Intelligence Agency. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Venables earned a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of York, and an MSc in Computation and Cryptography from the Queen’s College at Oxford University. He was awarded the designation of Chartered Engineer in 1995, and Chartered Scientist in 2002. Venables was elected a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2005.