GoldenTree Asset Management has hired Ellen Conti as partner and chief financial officer, the New York based credit investment firm said in a statement issued on September 8, 2026. The firm manages over 71 billion dollars in assets.
Conti will report to Kathy Sutherland, the firm's chief executive officer, and will oversee the finance function, including accounting and tax. The statement names no predecessor in the role and gives no separate effective date beyond the date of the announcement.
Steve Tananbaum, the firm's founder, managing partner and chief investment officer, said it has continued to broaden and deepen its expertise across asset classes since inception more than 26 years ago, and that as it continues to grow, having the right financial leadership in place is important to continued success. He added that Conti brings extensive experience leading finance organisations.
Kathy Sutherland said Conti has an outstanding track record of leadership across finance, accounting, treasury and strategic initiatives at leading alternative investment firms, and that her deep financial, strategic and operational expertise will be valuable as the firm continues to grow and develop new offerings for clients. Conti said in the same statement that she looked forward to working alongside a finance team whose leaders average nearly 20 years with the firm.
Conti joins from Sculptor Capital, where she was executive managing director and chief financial officer and a member of the firm's Partner Management Committee. Trade press reporting, citing Bloomberg, states that she spent more than two years as chief financial officer at Sculptor Capital, which was acquired by Rithm Capital in 2024, and that before that she held senior roles at Assured Investment Management and at BlueMountain Capital Management. That record spans several alternative investment and credit managers.
GoldenTree Asset Management is an employee owned, global asset management firm that specialises in opportunities across the credit universe, in sectors including high yield bonds, leveraged loans, private credit, distressed debt, structured credit, emerging markets, real estate, private equity and credit themed equities. It was founded in 2000 and describes itself as one of the largest independent global credit asset managers.
The firm manages over 71 billion dollars for institutional investors, among them public and corporate pensions, endowments, foundations, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. It has over 320 employees and offices in New York, West Palm Beach, Charlotte, Newport Beach, Dallas, London, Dublin, Munich, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Dubai.
The hire comes as credit managers across the sector continue to expand into private credit and structured strategies, and as the finance function inside a large alternative manager takes on a broader set of responsibilities. A firm operating across a dozen offices and multiple jurisdictions, with institutional clients that impose their own reporting and diligence standards, requires a finance organisation that handles accounting, tax and regulatory work across several product structures at once. That has made the chief financial officer role in alternative asset management a senior commercial position rather than a purely technical one, and firms have increasingly filled it from the ranks of their peers.
Granting Conti partner status alongside the chief financial officer title places the role inside the firm's ownership structure at an employee owned business, rather than treating it as a functional appointment. Both Tananbaum and Sutherland framed the hire around growth and the development of new client offerings, which points to a finance function expected to support product expansion as well as to run reporting and control. The recruitment of a chief financial officer from a directly comparable alternative manager suggests the firm was looking for someone who had already operated at that scale.
