The hardest part of finding a niche investment manager is often not the finding. It is everything that comes next. A financial adviser has to understand the strategy, trust the team, fit the idea into a portfolio and access it through a workable product. The manager, meanwhile, needs distribution, operations, compliance and a way through the thicket of platforms that stands between a good process and an actual investor. Mark Goodwin built North Square Investments in that awkward middle. It is a place where stock pickers can keep picking stocks while someone else worries about the shelf.
Goodwin arrived at this problem by taking the long route. He began as a CPA at Ernst & Young, serving clients in several industries. Management roles at MITRE Corporation and Putnam Investments followed. Then came 17 years at Pioneer Investments, where his jobs included chief financial officer and chief operating officer. By the time he moved to Oak Ridge Investments, eventually serving as president and COO, he had seen an asset manager through the windows of accounting, finance, operations, product development and distribution.
This is not the usual biography of an investing celebrity. Goodwin does not advertise a single trade that made his name. His subject is the machinery around the trade. At Oak Ridge, his corporate-development remit included broadening the product line and finding new distribution opportunities. Those are dry phrases until one notices how many investment firms rise or stall on precisely those tasks.
A founder after the apprenticeship
In July 2018, Goodwin became a founding member and CEO of North Square. The launch involved a lift-out of 24 experienced people from Oak Ridge, along with distribution, operations and product capabilities. Several had worked together before. Members of the group also put personal money into the new firm. For all the language of institutional platforms, the beginning had the intimate texture of a team choosing to cross the street together.
The timing was deliberate. Passive funds had made broad market exposure cheap and easy, placing particular pressure on traditional large-cap active mutual funds. Goodwin argued that a new firm, free of a legacy asset base in the most challenged categories, could spend its energy on growth rather than defense. North Square would look for specialist teams, often in less efficient corners of markets, then package and distribute their work for advisers and investors.
“Unburdened by legacy assets under management in categories challenged by passive investments, we are free to focus on pursuing growth opportunities.”Mark Goodwin, at North Square’s launch
The distinction matters. North Square was not founded on the claim that active management wins everywhere. Goodwin has described passive investing as having a profound effect on large-cap domestic equities. His public conversations instead circle the conditions that can make active decisions useful: a repeatable research process, a capable team, a sensible portfolio structure and a market where prices do not always reflect all available information.
There is a pleasing modesty in this design. The platform is important because it helps other people remain specialized. A small-cap manager should be able to keep studying small companies. A fixed-income team should not have to become a national sales organization. North Square centralizes the tasks that benefit from scale while leaving the underlying investment identities visible. In an industry fond of consolidation, it is consolidation with name tags still attached.
The curation is the part that prevents the platform from becoming a department store. At its 2019 launch, North Square said it wanted to save advisers time by identifying and vetting active managers with pedigree, discipline and a record of risk-adjusted performance. That promise shifts the burden onto the platform. Access is useful only when somebody has done the awkward work of asking how a strategy behaves, what could make it fail and whether the people running it can explain their decisions without hiding behind a fog machine of finance words.
Risk, in this model, is not an afterthought stapled to a glossy return chart. Goodwin’s podcast conversations repeatedly return to downside capture, liquidity, diversification and the circumstances in which a process should work. The tone is less treasure hunt than engineering inspection. An adviser needs more than a reason to buy. The adviser needs to know what role a strategy is meant to play when markets become impolite. North Square’s emphasis on differentiated strategies therefore comes with a second requirement: difference has to be usable inside a portfolio, not merely interesting in a presentation.
The CEO as interviewer
One clue to Goodwin’s operating style is his role on North Square’s Active Insights podcast. He is frequently the interviewer, not the oracle. Across conversations on fixed income, international equities, small-cap value and multi-asset strategies, he asks portfolio managers to explain their philosophy, research process, sources of opportunity and approach to risk. The pattern resembles institutional due diligence translated into a conversation an adviser can use.
In a 2025 video conversation, Goodwin discussed the effect of active ETFs and the features he looks for when evaluating managers. The format itself was telling. He spoke about people, process and the market setting around a strategy. The product wrapper matters because advisers increasingly use ETFs. But a convenient wrapper cannot rescue an incoherent investment process. The plumbing and the water both have to work.
That balance also explains the company’s breadth. North Square has worked across equities, fixed income, allocation strategies and alternatives, affiliating with firms through ownership, sub-advisory relationships and other partnerships. Different arrangements serve the same broad proposition: give specialist managers access to infrastructure and give advisers a curated route to strategies that may not sit on every familiar shelf.
A larger square
The model entered a new phase in July 2025, when North Square agreed to be acquired by Azimut Group. The transaction closed on January 8, 2026. North Square became part of Azimut NSI, an integrated U.S. platform that also includes CS McKee and Kennedy Capital Management. Goodwin took the chief executive role at Azimut NSI while continuing to lead North Square.
The combination widened the map. At launch, Azimut NSI described more than $20 billion in assets on the platform, relationships across hundreds of retail distribution firms and thousands of adviser teams, plus a substantial institutional network. Goodwin spoke about the appeal of joining a global organization with perspectives across developed and emerging markets. He also pointed to technology, including AI-infused tools used to make distribution more efficient. For a company built around routes to market, better maps are not decorative.
Scale brings its own question. A multi-boutique platform works only if the boutiques remain more than labels on a corporate diagram. The job is to gain reach without sanding away the particular expertise that made each manager attractive. Goodwin’s career has prepared him for that tension. A CFO understands constraints. A COO sees dependencies. A distributor hears what clients ask for. A founder has to make those perspectives coexist before lunch.
The durable idea is simple: centralize what benefits from scale, and protect what benefits from independence.
The opportunity between the boxes
North Square’s recent product moves show the platform adapting rather than merely growing. In July 2026 it launched the North Square Disciplined Value ETF and North Square Growth Opportunities ETF, both managed by teams assembled from CS McKee. Goodwin described the structure as one advisers were increasingly requesting. A month later, the North Square fund family reported more than $4 billion in assets, with organic inflows contributing to the rise.
Numbers are tidy; the path to them rarely is. Goodwin’s story passes through an accounting firm, a research organization, established asset managers, a Chicago boutique and finally a company he helped create. Each stop added another piece of the operating system. Seen backward, it looks like a plan. Lived forward, it was probably a collection of difficult jobs whose usefulness became apparent later.
The practical lesson travels beyond investing. Many industries contain skilled creators on one side and willing customers on the other, separated by an unglamorous maze of packaging, trust, regulation and distribution. Founders often rush toward the visible ends of that chain. Goodwin chose the connective tissue. He built around the belief that a worthy investment process can still fail to travel, and that helping it travel is a business in its own right.
There is wit in the company’s name if one wants to find it. A square is stable, legible and not especially flamboyant. It is also a place where people meet. Goodwin has spent his career making those meetings possible: manager and platform, strategy and wrapper, adviser and idea. The funds remain the headline product. The bridge is the product hiding underneath.