Northern Trust Wealth Management hired a new chief investment officer for its global family-office group: Beata Kirr, a veteran in guiding decisions about large private portfolios, who is returning to an allocator role after a stint at a private-credit firm.
Kirr was most recently the managing director and chief impact officer at Copia Group, a direct lender. She previously spent 17 years at Bernstein Private Wealth Management, where she ultimately became national managing director and co-CIO, and also worked at what is now Harris Alternatives and Goldman Sachs.
She is replacing Trish Halper, who left the job in 2025 to become co-CIO at Cercano Management, the wealth management firm that spun out of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital in 2021.
Kirr joined Northern Trust’s family-office group last week, where, as CIO, she’ll work with 550 clients who have an average net worth of more than $1 billion.
A growing number of clients and their expanding wealth, coupled with rising markets, has made the family-office group the fastest-growing segment of Northern Trust’s wealth management business, the company told Modus. In 2025, the number of clients the group served grew 8% globally and 16% across international markets. At the end of 2025, the GFO managed a collective $194 billion in assets, up 14% from the previous year, and was the custodian of $908 billion in assets, up 13% from the previous year.
GFO’s 550 clients represent a significant percentage of the roughly 8,500 family offices worldwide and of Northern Trust’s business overall, which has $18.6 trillion in assets under custody or administration and $1.8 trillion under management. Last year, Northern Trust created a unit called family office solutions, a collection of services for all ultra-wealthy clients, breaking down walls between its global family and private investment groups.
At Bernstein, Kirr said she was among the employees who led significant changes to client portfolios, broadly shifting away from a predominantly long-only proprietary investment approach to a more hybrid one.
“What I thrive in is bringing forward change and innovation in the investing space,” Kirr told Modus, and she’s eager to apply what she learned working at the private credit firm, as well as her past experience, to her new job at Northern Trust.
Family-office investment portfolios aren’t just more numerous and bigger; they are getting more complex. Until recent years, surveys of family offices about their investments didn’t even include private credit. Now, on average, the target allocation to private credit at large offices is 5%.
All investors need to be opportunistic and responsive to market realities, and private credit is offering opportunities for various reasons today, including in the secondary space, according to Kirr. “I am a firm believer in the asset class,” she said.
Her work at Copia was eye-opening and made her “believe in the emerging manager space” in a way she hadn’t previously. Kirr argues there are good reasons to support and invest in emerging managers: They perform well, are accessible, and are more likely to be diverse and impact investors. “I think the tagline here is: just watch this space. I think there's a real opportunity here to not sacrifice returns and to deliver on a variety of goals.”
Artificial intelligence is—as it is for everyone—an investment theme that is top of mind for Kirr. She says it has staying power and that it is a factor across asset classes and portfolios.
Those are just some of the topics she expects to discuss with family offices.
“There's tremendous growth here. There's tremendous complexity. There's a tremendous opportunity to customize and provide investment options, and innovation is going to continue to be a through line. So that's why the space is exciting for me,” Kirr said about the family-office group.
Still, the starting point for any conversation about portfolios is the people.
“There is a choice when you have a big investing pool that's been created: How do you enter the market and how do you approach the market and build that investment policy? For family offices, that is a commonality. I think this is a place where Northern's GFO group really shines. The group can deliver on the barbell, and you start with the conservative, edging into the market, and eventually you may enter the private markets, or you may not,” Kirr said. “I often say to people that there is no standard, there is no requirement. It's their money.”
The executive has spent almost her entire career in Chicago and was familiar with Northern Trust, which is headquartered there. But after only a week, she feels that professionals and prospective clients underappreciate its investment capabilities. Storied doesn’t necessarily mean stodgy.
“To have a 130-year history and an opportunity to evolve that history with this segment in many ways—leading the way in growth and wealth management—is tremendously exciting. Those are many of the reasons I joined,” Kirr said. “The brand is about trust. Trust is in the name, right?”
You quit your job at a hedge fund in 2010 to start Santangel's Review. Why?
I noticed a gap in the market that I couldn't stop thinking about: the best investors are sometimes the ones least focused on raising capital, meaning they end up running small, under-the-radar funds that allocators never hear about.
At the same time, family offices, endowments, and foundations are drowning in pitches from funds that are often better at marketing than investing. I started Santangel's Review to bridge that divide and help surface genuine talent that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Tell me more about the lesser-known asset managers you work with.
They have top-tier track records but are off the beaten path. They rely on their own rigorous research rather than following the crowd, which is precisely what makes them outstanding and sometimes deeply contrarian. Our bar for inclusion is high, and we're proud that several managers who were unknown when they first presented with us have since become widely recognized in the industry.
Why are family offices among the allocators interested in Santangel’s events?
Family offices are constantly searching for the best investing talent but are bombarded by fund pitches. Our Roundtables help them by doing the vetting up front. Every manager featured has been rigorously evaluated, so allocators know the quality is already there.
Everyone wants to engage meaningfully with one another, so the format includes eight one-on-one meetings, an idea presentation session, and other networking opportunities. Our one-day events are high-signal and efficient.
When is the next event?
Our next roundtable is Thursday, May 7, in New York City.
All attendance is by invitation only. If any family office or institutional allocator wants to learn more or join, they can email me at sfriedman@santangels.com or visit the link below.
And we have other events coming up in Boston at Fenway Park (June 11), Chicago (July 22) and New York again (October 22).
More News
- Welcome to all the new readers this week! If you haven't already, reply to this email to say hello, and check out the entire Modus archive, tech map (which, I know, needs updating), and the Modus Family Office Allocation Index.
- Only in Modus last week: A New Foundation Has One Mission: Close The Yawning Cybersecurity Gap at Family Offices.
- Masttro, the investment management software company, has hired Dan Gorlick to be its chief product officer. He previously worked at BlackRock, Google, and S&P Global. “Dan brings a rare combination of institutional product leadership, client perspective, and operating discipline. His experience…speaks for itself and is highly relevant to where Masttro is headed,” Masttro CEO Jay McNamara said.
- Claire Brown, a doctor who served in the Air Force before founding Louisville-based hedge fund Aristides Capital, which manages $400 million, says a family-office client redeemed its approximately $8 million with the firm in response to its March investor letter. In the letter, Brown opposed the war on Iran and wrote that the Trump administration was “fascist.” Brown heard the office’s decision was due to their political rift (since 2008, the fund has had an annualized return of about 15%).
- Tom Callahan, CEO of Nasdaq Private Market, blamed regulation and argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that private companies wait too long to go public. “That companies now reach near-trillion-dollar valuations before entering the public markets raises questions about access and participation. Our answers to these questions will determine how millions of Americans invest for decades.”
- UBS published a next generation wealth transition report.
- The Rothschild Dynasty Survived Wars and Crises. Will the Epstein Files Tear It Apart?
- Is Al Hemmingsen the only family-office CIO vibe-coding and publishing open-source code on GitHub? Victoria Sienczewski, CEO and founder of AuumAI, an AI platform specifically for the workflows and analysis of LPs and allocators, interviewed him about what he’s doing and why.
- “‘CAUSE THE BUSTER KEPT ME OUTTA HANDCUFFS!” got me thinking…Is “The Fast and the Furious” a family-office movie about hiring and who to trust? I don’t know. But the franchise does tell the story of Hollywood.
- A must-read story this week by my former colleague, Amanda Cantrell of Bloomberg, about a form of autism therapy called applied behavior analysis, or ABA. Private equity firms have been snapping up ABA clinics and chains across the country, and America’s Go-To Autism Therapy Is Also the Most Controversial.
Jobs
- Maxx Properties, which owns and manages 35+ communities comprising over 9,000 multifamily units in seven states, is hiring a family office manager in Purchase, New York.
- Unlimited.ai, the investment management software startup founded by a former executive of Legacy Knight, has a bunch of open jobs: Data scientist, front-end engineer, back-end engineer, database engineer, customer success manager and product manager.
- This is sort of a family-office job? Recruiting firm H-Squared is helping the leader of a globally recognized investment firm in the Portland area hire a ghostwriter. This person will help them craft “high-impact, opinion-led articles that shape how investors, clients, and the wider market think about finance.”
Other Stuff
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I'll be in...
- Brooklyn, where I live, catching up on T.V. and relaxing after a crazy week.
