Kweku Obed is a managing director for Marquette Associates and serves on the firm’s board of directors. An owner of the firm, Kweku has been with the company since 2014 and has 25 years of investment experience. Kweku chairs the firm’s defined contribution services committee and serves as the primary consultant on several client relationships.

Kweku joined the firm from Mercer Investment Consulting, where he served as a principal and senior investment consultant in their Chicago office. His responsibilities included working with defined benefit and defined contribution clients on asset allocation, performance measurement and analysis, investment manager search, and investment policy development. Prior to Mercer, Kweku worked at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (now part of BlackRock) as an assistant vice president in their tax-exempt fixed income research group.

Kweku holds a B.S. with honors in economics from Queen Mary College, University of London, and an M.S. in development economics from SOAS, University of London. He is a recipient of the Bernard Corry Prize in Economics. Kweku is a CFA^® charterholder and a member and former director of CFA Society Chicago. He also holds the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst designation and contributed to the official CAIA textbook, CAIA Level I: An Introduction to Core Topics in Alternative Investments, Second Edition. He is the author of The Stranded Fish: Decision-Making Through the Lens of a Fiduciary, as well as the children’s books Talking About the ABCs of Financial Literacy and Talking About the ABCs of Financial Responsibility. He has contributed two chapters on asset allocation and defined contribution plans to the IFEPB’s Trustee Handbook and he is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.

Kweku is a member of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Advisory Committee as appointed by the President of the United States. He currently serves on the board of the National Association of Securities Professionals (NASP) and the board of directors for Working in the Schools (“WITS”). He is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago.