Robert K. Steel

Mr. Steel is a Partner at Perella Weinberg Partners.

Mr. Steel has more than 40 years of experience. Prior to joining Perella Weinberg Partners in May of 2014, Mr. Steel was New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development where he was responsible for the Bloomberg Administration’s five-borough economic development strategy and job-creation efforts, and oversaw such agencies as the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Department of City Planning, Department of Small Business Services, NYC Economic Development Corporation and NYC & Company, and chaired the Brooklyn Bridge Park board. A key initiative of Mayor Bloomberg’s Administration was to encourage and grow the technology sector of New York City’s economy and Mr. Steel led the applied sciences initiative, which established the Cornell-Technion campus on Roosevelt Island and New York University Center for Urban Science and Progress initiative in Brooklyn, New York.

He was previously president and CEO of Wachovia Corporation, where he oversaw the sale of the bank to Wells Fargo & Co. and served on the Wells Fargo board of directors until 2010. Prior to that, Mr. Steel was Under Secretary for Domestic Finance of the United States Treasury, where he revived the President’s Working Group, the core group to respond to the global economic crisis of 2008. He managed the Department’s Blueprint for Modernized Regulatory Structure, which recommended several of the reforms since pursued by the Obama administration.

Mr. Steel also spent nearly 30 years at Goldman Sachs, rising to Head of the Global Equities Division, Vice Chairman of the firm, and a member of its Management Committee. He began his Goldman Sachs career in Chicago and then spent more than seven years in London before returning to the United States to work in the New York headquarters. Mr. Steel also was a member of the board of directors of Barclays from 2005 to 2006.

He is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Mr. Steel is Chairman Emeritus of the Aspen Institute’s Board of Trustees and has served as Chairman of Duke’s Board of Trustees, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion, Chairman of The After-School Corporation, co-chair of the Bloomberg Global Business Council, and Co-Founder of SeaChange Capital Partners, an organization dedicated to helping nonprofits grow. Mr. Steel serves on the board of Cadence Bank.