Wharton School

Wharton Global Family Alliance Announces Support from Mellon Financial Corporation
Three-year commitment supports family business research goals

Feb. 28, 2005 — The Wharton School announced that Mellon Financial Corporation has joined the Wharton Global Family Alliance as a lead underwriter. The Wharton Global Family Alliance (Wharton GFA) is the first global family consortium of its kind engaged in research, teaching, and outreach to create a distinctive resource for family businesses worldwide. Mellon will provide significant support over three years to help further the research objectives of the Wharton GFA as it creates substantive new knowledge related to family businesses.

Mellon will also lend its expertise to collaborations with the Wharton Global Family Alliance Research Committee, which comprises prominent Wharton faculty members from several research disciplines who are building knowledge on such topics as corporate governance, business succession, wealth management and societal wealth creation. Wharton GFA lead faculty include Raphael (Raffi) Amit, Robert B. Goergen Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Ian MacMillan, Fred R. Sullivan Professor of Management.

”This is an important research program,” said Martin G. McGuinn, Mellon chairman and chief executive officer. “At its roots, Mellon itself is a family business, founded to finance the individual and family enterprises that fueled America’s industrial revolution. Today, much of our clients’ wealth is still built from, and intrinsically tied to, family enterprises. We view our investment in WGFA as a new chapter in this long, proud history. We look forward to both contributing to and benefiting from the new ideas and knowledge this investment will enable us to bring to our clients and others.”

“Mellon’s commitment to the Wharton Global Family Alliance will allow us to dig deep into family business issues and build a knowledge base of scholarly research that will directly benefit large family firms as well as the communities to which they contribute economically,“ said Prof. Amit, who serves as Chairman of the Wharton GFA Executive Committee.

As one of the largest organizations in the country dedicated to the wealth management needs of private investors and family offices, Mellon’s expertise and proprietary knowledge base will serve to enhance the research mission of the Wharton GFA.

For more information, visit the Wharton GFA website.

About Mellon Financial
For more than 135 years, Mellon has helped families build, manage and preserve their wealth. Founded initially to serve the Mellon family and its charitable interests, Mellon’s family office business was among the first of its kind in the U.S. Mellon is among the nation’s leading private wealth managers, providing wealth planning, investment management, and financial management services to financially successful individuals, families, family offices, charitable gift programs, endowments and foundations. Mellon’s Private Wealth Management group has more than 60 offices nationwide.

Mellon Financial Corporation is a global financial services company. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Mellon is one of the world's leading providers of financial services for institutions, corporations and high net worth individuals, providing institutional asset management, mutual funds, private wealth management, asset servicing, human resources services and treasury services. Mellon has more than $3.7 trillion in assets under management, administration or custody, including $670 billion under management. Its asset management companies include The Dreyfus Corporation and U.K.-based Newton Investment Management Limited. More about Mellon is available at www.mellon.com.

About the Wharton Global Family Alliance and the Wharton School
The Wharton Global Family Alliance is a unique institution that allows global families to transcend boundaries to collaborate for their mutual benefit and for the betterment of society as a whole. Wharton GFA research is developed in conjunction with families who are actively engaged in primary economic activity and exert significant influence in their arenas of operation.

Formed in collaboration with CCC Alliance, WGFA is a private forum that is designed to foster productive collaboration, learning, and knowledge creation. WGFA is the first global family consortium of its kind, focused on research into, and the sharing of, best practices of globally influential family enterprises

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized around the world for its academic strengths across every major discipline and at every level of business education. Founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school in the nation, Wharton has approximately 4,600 undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and doctoral students, more than 8,000 participants in its executive education programs annually, and an alumni network of more than 80,000 worldwide.