People On The Move
Pamela Radsch has been appointed West Coast group leader of Marsh Inc.'s U.S. Private Client Services Family Office Group. The Family Office Group has offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Minneapolis. Radsch will direct risk management consultation and integrated insurance placement services for high-net-worth families. Radsch has focused exclusively on serving the lifestyle and wealth management needs of family office clients for the past 12 years. Before joining Marsh, she was with Hub International.

 

Kenneth A. Kopelman and Gerald Russello have joined Bingham McCutchen's New York office in the firm's securities area, which includes 125 lawyers. Kopelman, former head of Bear Stearns Fixed Income and Derivatives Legal Groups, joins as a partner and Russello, former managing director of Bear Stearns Legal Department, joins as of counsel.

Warren Williams has joined US Fiduciary Inc., based in Houston, as senior vice president, chief financial officer, and Jack Bruno as vice president, chief compliance officer. Williams was CFO of Willbros Inc. from 2001 to 2006 and before that he was a partner at Ernst & Young, where he helped lead its franchising practice group. Bruno previously served as vice president, compliance manager, at Stanford Financial for three years and also as a vice president at Merrill Lynch, where he worked in compliance and operations for 20 years. US Fiduciary is a boutique financial advisory firm serving high-end independent financial advisors and their high-net-worth and institutional clients.

Wells Fargo Expands Private Bank To New York
Wells Fargo & Company has expanded its private bank to serve the New York metropolitan and the greater Northeast areas. John Duchala was named regional manager responsible for the region.

Wells Fargo Private Bank has been expanding since 2006 beyond Wells Fargo's 23 community-banking states. Duchala leads a team of investment managers, trust officers and financial consultants from the Wells Fargo Private Bank offices at 40 West 57th St. in New York.

Before joining Wells Fargo, Duchala was Northeast regional director for JPMorgan Private Client Services, based in New York, where he was responsible for personal trust, private banking, brokerage and investment management services. Duchala has 22 years of wealth and investment management experience. He holds a master's degree in business administration from Old Dominion University and a bachelor's degree from State University of New York.

Private Equity Firm Formed
LJH Global Investments and John R. Jonge Poerink have co-founded a private equity firm, LJH Linley Capital, that will invest in global mid-sized companies.

LJH Global Investments, an alternative investment management firm that works with high-net-worth individuals and families throughout the United States and Europe, is providing interim equity financing that will enable the new firm to make immediate investments ranging from $50 million to $800 million.

LJH Linley Capital expects to invest in companies in a variety of sectors, including consumer products, industrial and manufacturing.
For further information, please visit www.linleycapital.com or call (239) 403 3030.

Subprime Mess Leads FOs To Alter Policies
More than half of multifamily offices participating in a study by The Family Wealth Alliance say they have altered their investment policies or practices as a result of problems that began in the subprime mortgage sector and spread to other areas of the fixed-income markets.
The MFOs, which oversee $333 billion in assets, took steps that include tightening credit monitoring of securities issuers and counterparties; reducing fixed-income allocations in favor of cash; avoiding collateralized or high-yield debt; and switching to money market funds that invest only in U.S. Treasury securities. Some also began to monitor the solvency of custodian banks and broker-dealers after the sudden collapse of Bear, Stearns & Co.

"The rough waters in the financial markets have presented a major challenge to multifamily offices over the past year," said Robert Casey, senior managing director of research for The Family Wealth Alliance and author of the report. "But it is just one of many challenges they are facing. For example, the shortage of top-drawer wealth management professionals and the competition to recruit them represent an acute problem that is disrupting the growth plans of many firms."

Still, these MFO firms posted strong gains in 2007 in both new client relationships and total assets under advisement. MFOs had a median gain of 25% in the number of client relationships over the previous year. Assets under advisement increased by 12.1%.
Findings of The Family Wealth Alliance's 2008 Multifamily Office Study were released at its annual MFO Forum October 1-2 in Chicago.