Northern Trust hires two private bankers from Citi and BNY in Northeast push

Northern Trust Wealth Management said Monday it has hired two senior private bankers away from rival firms, adding Citi Private Bank's Beth Emswiler in New York and BNY's Andrew Borner in Greenwich, Connecticut, as senior managing directors — appointments that arrived with titles and cities but no client-asset figure attached. InvestmentNews first reported the moves.

Emswiler arrives from Citi Private Bank, where she was head of investments for Metro New York and oversaw investment solutions for ultra-high-net-worth clients and family offices, while Borner was most recently BNY's market president for Connecticut and Long Island, responsible for new business development and for working directly with individuals, families, trusts and foundations to build and carry out investment and wealth plans. Both have spent more than 30 years in the business, and Emswiler's career has run through private banking, equities, sales and trading, capital markets and investment advisory — the full set of seats a family with an operating company, a concentrated public position and a set of trusts may need filled at once.

No client-asset figure accompanied either hire, and that absence says something about the business Northern Trust is underwriting. Moves this desk tracks on the brokerage side often arrive with a number attached — $525 million of client assets for the Edelman team that staffed Baird's Chandler office, for instance — while private-bank appointments at this level are announced as names, titles and cities, which suggests what Northern Trust is underwriting is a relationship set and the introductions it can generate, not a ledger that changes hands on a start date. The money tends to follow a family's own schedule.

The pair are the latest in a run of Northeast additions under Katie Nixon, who was appointed region president in December after serving as chief investment officer of the private wealth business since 2012 and was succeeded in the CIO role by Eric Freedman. "Clients expect us to understand both the complexity of substantial wealth and the personal goals it supports," Nixon said, describing Emswiler as bringing considerable investment experience and Borner as having spent his career earning the trust of families. "Together, they will help us bring the full breadth of Northern Trust to more clients," she said.

The appointments land a week after Northern Trust added two senior people to its Family Office Solutions team in New York, the unit the firm has spent roughly 18 months building to give ultra-wealthy families family-office services without the cost of running their own. August brought Gloria Fieldcamp as a senior lead relationship manager and James Le Rose as a senior relationship manager, both in New York, plus Candice Nakagawa as a Family Office Solutions managing director for the West Region, and the firm has named Beata Kirr as investment chief for the global family office unit.

All of it sits alongside a wider leadership change, as Northern Trust said last week that Chief Financial Officer Dave Fox will retire, remaining in the role through the end of the first quarter of 2027 while the company runs an internal and external search for a successor; Fox joined the firm in 2012 after more than 25 years at JPMorgan. A CFO succession that stretches more than a year is its own kind of recruiting problem, and it arrives in the same season as the client-facing hiring, which is why the two should be read separately rather than as one restructuring story — the wealth build predates the Fox announcement and carries its own author in Nixon.

Citi has spent the autumn raiding the private-bank leadership of its competitors — our September reporting counted three hires from rival private banks in a single round — and Emswiler's exit runs the traffic the other way. The seat she leaves is tied to precisely the ultra-high-net-worth and family-office clients Citi has been staffing around, including the September hire of JPMorgan's Adam Clark to run global wealth planning as the bank pushes deeper into that advisory work. What Citi does with the Metro New York investment mandate is one measure of how central that push is; the coverage does not say who, if anyone, will take it over.

These hires also belong to the quieter end of the recruiting market, the kind that arrive as a title and a geography rather than a headline number. A September look at that front made the same point from a different angle: the transactions with the least noise attached are frequently the ones that matter most, because the platform has bought access to families who were never going to move through a published book sale. Northern Trust has now made that bet twice in two weeks in the same city.

Set end to end, the Northeast additions describe a specific client: two family-office people in New York, two relationship managers in the region in August, a West Region family-office director, and now a pair of 30-year private bankers placed on either side of the New York–Connecticut line, one carrying a Citi title that speaks to investment solutions and the other a BNY title built on business development and trust-and-estate relationships. Nixon runs the region, Freedman runs investments, and the family-office unit has an investment chief in Kirr; the CFO succession stays open into 2027, and Citi's backfill remains unfilled — those are the two still open on the chart.