Northern Trust Wealth Management has appointed Beata Kirr to be the new chief investment officer of its global family office division.
In the new role Kirr will oversee investment strategy for the wealth manager’s more than 550 ultra-high-net-worth clients, which have a combined $497.6 billion in assets.
Kirr was most recently chief impact officer at The Copia Group, a middle-market private credit firm based in Chicago, where she spent almost three years.
Kirr joins Northern Trust’s family office amid an increasingly complex time for UHNW clients and for the wealth management industry more generally, with increased demand for private market investments and marketable securities across multiple jurisdictions.
“Our family office clients are very disciplined, but that doesn’t mean they’ve tuned out the noise around geopolitical uncertainty and market volatility,” Kirr told Institutional Investor in an email, adding that she is looking forward to helping clients manage that complexity holistically.
“They’re seizing this as an opportunity to capture dislocation and allocate more deliberately,” she said. “With dispersion widening, access alone isn’t enough; they want help being selective and building portfolios that hold together under stress.”
Kirr recently served on the board of directors of Nomura’s active ETF trust for the past two and a half years, but stepped down from the role this month. Prior to that she spent over 16 years on the investment team at Bernstein Private Wealth Management, including more than three as co-CIO.
Kirr’s philanthropic roles include oversight of investment performance for the endowment of Congregation Sukkat Shalom, a synagogue in Illinois, and for Women Employed, a non-profit focused on improving the economic state of women.
In addition, Kirr has been actively involved in the OCIO selection process for the Poetry Foundation as an independent trustee.
