Symphony is representative of Mr. Chavez’s larger strategy. He gave up the opportunity to develop the software internally and turn it into a source of revenue in order to create something that everyone in the industry might use, and that might allow Goldman to communicate with all of its clients better, even if it is not making money off Symphony itself.

But the software, like other programs Mr. Chavez is pushing, faces major hurdles to its success. It still needs to win over investment firms — the biggest clients of the banks — and many of them are hesitant to use software that, they worry, might give the banks a way to snoop on their communications.

Mr. Chavez’s efforts have also faced skepticism in the technology community, in no small part because of a prominent case in which the company accused a former employee and programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, of stealing Goldman’s software upon leaving the company.

Mr. Aleynikov prevailed in court. And the case left the impression in the tech world — among some of the very programmers Goldman is now trying to recruit — that the bank would always value its bottom line over the ideals of Silicon Valley.

Mr. Chavez was not involved in Mr. Aleynikov’s case. And he has been trying to confront Wall Street’s mixed reputation among programmers. He has gone to lead recruiting events at elite institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the number of students applying to Wall Street has fallen sharply, in part because of the perception of the industry as stuffy and slow-moving.

Mr. Chavez has not been shy about pushing the company to embrace social issues as a selling point. He urged its human resources department to expand benefits to gay partners before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. He then encouraged Mr. Blankfein to speak out in support of gay marriage.

Still, he acknowledges, there is much to do. At the Recode event last fall, he joked about Goldman’s lack of diversity.

He was in an office, he said, with a fellow Hispanic executive, when another executive stopped by. “He opens the door, he sticks his head in, and he says, ‘50 percent of the Hispanic partners of Goldman Sachs, right here, right now.’” The task now, he said, was to take Goldman “to a different place.”