Daughter of the only Black person on Forbes 400 list in 1991 makes history launching multifamily office

Christina Lewis is the daughter of Reginald Lewis who achieved fame and fortune with a $985 million buyout of food conglomerate Beatrice International Foods in 1987. He went on to become the only Black person on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans when he first appeared on the list in 1991 with a $340 million fortune, according to Forbes.

Following in the footsteps of her dad, Lewis just founded Beatrice Advisors, a multifamily office and the first business of its kind by a Black woman. She is launching the company with a portion of her assets from her private family office called BFO21 and other high-net-worth families largely from her network.

“The next gen can be very under-advised, as I was and as my whole family was when my dad passed away,” said Lewis, who was 12 when she lost her father. “He had all the intellectual capital related to investing and financial access, and of course never expected to die at 50 years old.”

Research cited by CNBC states that more than $84 trillion is expected to be passed down from older to younger generations in the next 30 years. Beatrice Advisors aims to change the traditional business of managing the fortunes of the wealthy and inheritors while making education and accessibility key since many young inheritors will not know much about managing wealth, according to CNBC.

To help her achieve her aim, Lewis has hired industry veteran Meredith Bowen to be the president and chief investment officer of Beatrice Advisors. Bowen is coming from Seven Bridges Advisors, a $6.4 billion multifamily office where she mostly advised families with fortunes from sophisticated careers, Forbes reported.

Lewis is currently operating her business with a staff of six and a midtown Manhattan office and hopes to expand through the rest of the year. With the majority of the youth now being more technology-driven, Lewis and her firm have built a high-tech dashboard to give families “an up-to-the-minute, unified view of their portfolio and assets,” as reported by CNBC.

“We’re creating this whole dashboard that says, here are all of the elements of your financial life. And then we go through and we make sure that every element of that picture is as you describe it,” said Bowen. “What we find is, a lot of times when we go through this exercise, there is a disconnect between what people think exists in their financial picture and what actually does.”

Prior to starting Beatrice Advisors, Lewis worked as a journalist for a decade before founding the nonprofit All Star Code. The nonprofit is a high school summer program that has taught coding to more than 1,000 young men of color to prepare them for tech careers. Lewis is also the vice chair of the Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, which has $24 million in assets.