Ascent Private Capital Management has hired an historian to manage an asset that some families cherish as much as their money: their legacies.
“We know that managing the wealth of families is much more than managing their money,” said Scott Winget, Ascent’s senior managing director and head of wealth impact planning. “Using a family history helps establish what a family’s values are.”
Ascent, a private banking unit of U.S. Bank, has hired Karen McNeill as director of family history and believes it is the first in the private banking industry to create such a staff position.
McNeill, who joined the bank on June 1, will research family histories and genealogies for client families by drawing on letters, diaries, photos and other archives. She will then give presentations of her work at family reunions and meetings.
That makes her something of an asset manager, despite her lack of investment training.
“I hadn’t thought about it at first, but when I found out what the job was I thought it would be a fantastic fit with my background,” said McNeill, who has a doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley and 15 years of experience working on personal history projects with individuals and private and public sector organizations.
The work—using a family’s history as an integral part of legacy building and wealth transfer—is part of a growing trend in the area of family wealth management, particularly among ultra-high-net-worth clients like those Ascent serves.
“You ask questions about the past, what values shaped the family history,” said McNeill, who will be based in San Francisco. “When you learn how the family has prepared heirs in the past, you may find common ground for building a family mission statement.”
While a number of financial advisors work with historians, McNeill’s duties are unique in a bank setting and Ascent believes it is the first wealth management practice inside a bank to have a staff historian, Winget said.
“We’re able to take [a family history] and build a mission statement for the future,” Winget said.
He cited a study that found 70 percent of family wealth transfers fail, mostly due to an inadequate preparation of heirs to handle an inheritance and a lack of trust and poor communication among family members. Ascent, whose target clients have at least $50 million in net worth, also has psychologists on staff to help family members work on communication skills and make decisions about wealth transfer. McNeill will work with them as a part of a team in the area of wealth impact planning.
“I spent many years teaching and have assigned many students autobiographies,” said McNeill, who taught history “off and on” for about 13 years at Berkeley, the University of the Pacific, Ohlone College and the Academy of Art University. “I have seen how it links them directly to the past. It empowers them.”
McNeill, who was born in Massachusetts but raised in Southern California, said teaching is going to be part of her new duties.
In addition to family histories and retreats, McNeill is also working on other history-related projects. For instance, she is creating a tool that uses history as an icebreaker at a women’s leadership and legacy retreat U.S. Bank is hosting in Santa Barbara.
McNeill says she has loves history since she was as a child travelling with her family to national parks across the country. She also said her seventh-grade European history teacher’s love of history was “infectious.”
McNeill has also worked as a historian at Carey & Co., Inc., an architectural firm in San Francisco, and as a consultant to Landmarks California. She is a director on the Landmark Heritage Foundation Board and earned several honors and awards, including a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her biography of Julia Morgan, architect for the Hearst family.
U.S. Bank created Ascent about two years ago to provide comprehensive wealth management services, including multigenerational wealth planning, to ultra-high-net-worth clients. Ascent currently has offices in Cincinnati, Denver, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle.
