Joan Steel is CEO and founder of Alpha Wealth Advisors LLC, a financial consulting firm advising family offices, private foundations, and endowments in the United States and South America. Prior to founding the firm, she was a senior investment advisor with the global asset manager Capital Group, where she built a sizeable private client business.

Steel was Aon’s chief marketing officer after leading global investor and media relations. Prior to Aon, she was a senior executive in her family’s privately held water treatment chemical manufacturing and distribution business that was later sold to Olin Corp.

She also co-founded and headed institutional fixed income sales and trading for E.F. Hutton in Chicago after starting her career at Salomon Brothers as an institutional fixed income broker and one of the first professional women on Wall Street.

Steel is an independent director of the Mercer Funds, a family of institutional mutual funds. She chairs the NACD Chicago Chapter and serves as a trustee of Rush University Medical Center and Cuneo Foundation. She is a former independent director of the Hershey Trust Co., controlling shareholder of The Hershey Co., and former trustee of Loyola University Chicago where she chaired the University’s Endowment.

She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a BS from Georgetown University and has completed continuing director education at Harvard Business School and Stanford Directors’ College.