Threshold Grp calls on Citi, Merrill veteran to lead investment consulting. Gig harbor, Wash.-based multifamily office Threshold Group has a new CIO in former Citigroup executive David Rosenberg.

"We are genuinely excited to welcome David to our team because he brings such enthusiasm and insight when it comes to helping families with personalized investment strategy," says Threshold's president Ed Lazar. "He is passionate about what we are creating, why we are creating it, and how we are different from the traditional choices in wealth services."

Most complex

Threshold is a four-year-old commercial family office that caters to ultra-high-net-worth families. With advisory assets of about $6 billion, it provides investment consulting, estate planning, and advisory services to 11 families across 46 households. Though it hopes to add two or three new families a year, it has seen sharper growth than that over the past 30 months or so. In the spring of 2005 it advised five families on about $1 billion.

Rosenberg joined Citigroup, where he was managing director of for the U.S.-trust, estates and custody businesses of Citigroup Private Bank, late in 2002. In that role he was in charge of a team that integrated investment strategy, asset allocation and wealth advisory services for the bank's high-net-worth clients. Before that he was head of product marketing for Merrill Lynch's ultra-high-net-worth and institutional consulting businesses.

At Threshold, Rosenberg will be in charge of investment-advisory services.

A 25-year veteran of the financial-service industry, Rosenberg was keen to work in a family-office setting even before the opportunity to join Threshold presented itself -- in part because he relishes the challenge of bringing together a range of specialized services and applications. "In many ways, high-net-worth individuals are the most complex investors in the world," he says. "They combine a need for customized planning with tax issues, a complex investment environment and the emotional factors that come with family."

Rosenberg is slated to join Threshold's management team early in 2008. He'll replace Craig Hamilton, who became interim CIO when Jason Taylor left the firm for what Threshold says were personal reasons. Hamilton will return to his responsibilities with Threshold as a senior relationship manager.

Taylor moved to Threshold in 2006 from Ashbridge Investment Management, a Philadelphia-based multifamily office that, like Threshold, started out as a single family office. For more than 30 years Ashbridge was the private investment- and wealth-management office for the Grace family, which made its fortune on Bethlehem Steel in the first half of the twentieth century. It opened its doors to outside families in the early 1990s.

Threshold began in the late 1990s as a private office for the family of George Russell, founder and chairman emeritus of Tacoma, Wash.-based manager of managers Russell Investment Group (part of Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual since 1999). It became a commercial multifamily office in 2003.

In addition to its Gig Harbor headquarters, Threshold has regional offices in Portland, Ore., and New York. -FWR

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