Chris Allen to help develop wealth manager's business through the Old South. Bessemer Trust has hired Chris Allen as a principal of its Atlanta office. Reporting to senior resident officer Katherine McMaster, Allen will be in charge of business development in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi.

"As a long-time resident of Atlanta with extensive wealth management experience, Chris is ideal to help enhance our profile among prominent families in Atlanta and across this entire region," says McMaster.

Family offices

A 2004 study by Claritas, a San Diego-based market-research company, found that Atlanta had the fastest-growing millionaire population in the U.S., with other Southern centers - most notably Dallas - figuring prominently as high-net-worth growth centers as well.

Allen has an interesting background. Prior to hooking up with Bessemer, he was managing partner of Capital Growth Services, an advisory firm he founded in 2001. Before that, he was managed asset-allocation policy and strategy at Great American Ventures, an Atlanta-based single-family office. Before that, he was the investment manager for LOR, which served the interests of the late O. Wayne Rollins family.

(Rollins, by the way, executed the one of the first leveraged buyouts in corporate history, directing Rollins Inc.'s 1964 acquisition of Orkin, a pest-control company.)

New York-based Bessemer Trust is a 100-year-old multi-family office that oversees more than $43 billion in assets across something like 1,800 relationships. It originated as the family office of Henry Phipps, a partner of Andrew Carnegie in the Carnegie Steel Company.

"Bessemer" refers to Henry Bessemer, an English engineer who in the 1850s developed a method for making steel by blasting compressed air through molten iron to burn out excess carbon. Personally, however, Bessemer had nothing to do with Phipps or Carnegie or anyone else at Carnegie Steel. -FWR

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