Citi Wealth hires J.P. Morgan trusts chief for global planning role

Adam Clark will join Citi Wealth as global head of wealth planning, a New York-based role he takes up in November after garden leave, Family Wealth Report has reported. The hire pulls him out of J.P. Morgan, where he has been global head of trusts and estates.

Clark's current job is a large one. He oversees six operating entities, a team of 500 professionals, and 40 locations across the US, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. The report describes his tenure as spanning all aspects of J.P. Morgan's global trusts and estates business, including work with the private bank's complex global families and new business with ultra-high-net-worth clients.

Six operating entities is the detail worth pausing on. Clark has been running trust structures that exist as legal entities in their own right, each bound to the rules of its jurisdiction. That is different from advising families about trusts from the outside. For a bank that says it wants to raise its service and advisory capabilities for UHNW clients globally, it is a directly relevant form of experience.

Also embedded in the report is the business-development side of his tenure. Clark worked with complex global families and created new business with ultra-high-net-worth clients, according to Family Wealth Report. The inclusion matters: Citi is getting someone who has not just maintained a big operation but has gone out and built relationships on the strength of it. That combination, not the headcount alone, is the standard argument for a move of this kind.

The organization chart Citi has set around the hire is as clear as the appointment itself. Clark reports to Keith Glenfield, Citi Wealth's global head of investments. Under Clark sit three regional planning heads: Mike Troth for Asia, Elena Mortemore for the Americas, and Robert Stemmons for EMEA. Troth had been holding the global planning role on an interim basis; he returns to the Asia post under Clark.

Putting the global planning seat under the head of investments is a structural choice. It keeps tax, estate, and trust work beside portfolio construction rather than inside a separate legal or compliance function. The three regional heads beneath Clark give the planning function a single global owner. Families whose assets sit in one country, whose members live in another, and whose structures sit in a third are the audience for that arrangement.

Clark's route to the role runs through two large banks. He joined J.P. Morgan in November 2016 after seven years at Goldman Sachs, where his roles included president of the Goldman Sachs Trust Company and head of the international strategic wealth advisory team. Family Wealth Report puts his banking career at nearly 30 years, with expertise across tax, estate, trust, and wealth planning. Citi described his background as 'a tremendous asset' to its franchise.

Family Wealth Report does not name a successor at J.P. Morgan. Until November, Troth carries the global title on an interim basis; when Clark arrives, Troth becomes a regional head under him. The handoff is already decided, but the calendar still has to move.