Introducing McKinsey’s distinguished partner role and inaugural class

Clients are increasingly looking to McKinsey for deeper expertise, longer-term partnership, and enduring impact within their organizations. Today, leading organizations and their executives understand that a great idea or bold vision—though vital—are not enough to deliver transformation. Success means building new, sustained capabilities within their own companies.

To help our clients meet that challenge, our firm has introduced a distinguished partner role, a new designation that recognizes colleagues whose expertise has shaped client work, firm capabilities, and external practice in their fields.

Distinguished partners are elected alongside senior partners, reflecting the firm’s evolution to meet clients’ increasingly complex, technical, and execution-intensive challenges.

That evolution matters even more in an AI era, as our clients look to capture enduring business value from frontier technologies. As generative AI expands access to information and surfaces options faster than ever, domain expertise and human judgment will be critical to helping clients ask the right questions, apply technology in context, and translate insight into lasting impact.

“Our firm has always been built on exceptional people,” says Ozgur Tanrikulu, senior partner and global people leader. “Distinguished partner gives us a clear way to recognize partners who are defining their fields and creating lasting impact—and to show the next generation of firm leaders what that path can look like.”

McKinsey’s inaugural distinguished partner class

Photo of 2026 distinguished partners

McKinsey has long expected consultants to develop mastery in a domain, one of the ways the firm helps clients push the frontier of what’s possible. Over time, many colleagues grow breadth and leadership that can lead to senior partner. Distinguished partner recognizes a different, equally important path: colleagues who become reference points in their fields, build assets and capabilities used across the firm, and help shape external debate while continuing to work directly with clients.

“These colleagues do not only bring deep knowledge to client work,” says Becca Coggins, senior partner and global leader of client capabilities. “They build tools, academies, and other skills that make the whole firm stronger.”

The inaugural group of distinguished partners reflects the breadth of expertise clients are seeking across sectors, functions, and regions:

• Alex Liu (Minneapolis): Recognized as McKinsey’s leading expert on M&A and postmerger integration, advising CEOs and boards on complex transactions across industries to drive enterprise transformation and sustainable value creation.
• Davide Grande (Milan): Founded and scaled McKinsey’s CFO of the Future platform, building a cross-practice capability spanning strategy, finance, and AI while cultivating a global network of over 100 CFOs.
• Duarte Bacelar Begonha (Lisbon): A leading expert in telecommunications and cybersecurity, Duarte advises operators and technology leaders on network transformation, digital strategy, and cyber resilience. His work spans next-generation connectivity, operational technology security, customer experience, and digital infrastructure.
• Eren Cetinkaya (Istanbul): Delivered AI-powered manufacturing transformations that have produced multiple World Economic Forum Industry 4.0 Lighthouse winners, while helping petrochemical leaders redefine competitiveness during a historic industry downturn.
• Eric Buesing (Charlotte): Partnered with a global financial services organization for nearly a decade to redesign one of the world’s largest customer care operations, moving the client from isolated AI pilots to enterprise-scale transformation across workforce planning, customer service, and technology adoption.
• George Tsopelas (Athens): Leads McKinsey’s work in Greece and Cyprus, helping senior executives and public sector leaders drive enterprise transformations, strengthen organizational performance, and accelerate economic competitiveness. His experience spans energy, financial services, infrastructure, transportation, and national economic reform.
• Holger Hürtgen (Düsseldorf): Pioneered McKinsey’s data science and AI practice in Germany, rising to distinguished partner by driving AI-powered growth for global clients and mentoring the firm’s next generation of technical leaders through Analytics Academy.
• James Kaplan (New York): Codesigned a financial sector cyber resilience initiative that now safeguards 75 percent of US consumer banking accounts, establishing the architecture, governance, and operating model for an industry-wide immutable data standard.
• Jason Inacio (Sydney): Serves clients globally to design and deliver lasting operating model transformations. With more than a decade of experience leading digital, agile, and enterprise transformations, Jason helps organizations reinvent their operating models to drive sustainable change, stronger performance, and improved speed, customer, and employee outcomes across industries.
• Javier del Pozo (Seoul): Pioneered AI-enabled manufacturing and supply chain transformation across Asia–Pacific, advising CEOs and COOs on large-scale operational programs that improve productivity, resilience, and enterprise performance across more than 70 countries.
• Jeffrey Lorch (Boston): Leads McKinsey’s North American metals client service and steel value chain research. He supports corporate clients and investors on corporate strategy, M&A, and commercial optimization in metals and mining commodity markets.
• Jessica Kahn (Washington, DC): Advised multiple state healthcare agencies on high-stakes implementation challenges, from COVID-19 pandemic response to new Medicaid delivery models. She is most recently leading multi-state implementation of new federal Medicaid work requirements with a go-live approach aiming to minimize burden on beneficiaries and frontline workers.
• Ken Somers (Brussels): Codeveloped and patented an industrial energy optimization methodology now deployed by McKinsey colleagues globally to help clients reduce energy consumption, lower capital requirements, and accelerate decarbonization through proprietary digital tools.
• Matt Higginson (Boston): A leading voice on payments infrastructure and the practical readiness of digital assets such as stablecoins and tokenized financial products for global adoption, Matt partnered with a European organization to design and build the world's first fully regulated digital asset exchange on blockchain technology.
• Mischa Zielke (Dubai): Led one of the largest deployments of McKinsey's Organizational Health Index in the firm's history, partnering with a national government to establish organizational health as a core performance metric and anchor a broad public sector transformation.
• Quentin George (New York): Helped build some of the world’s leading retail media networks and define commerce media as a major growth opportunity, advising retailers, brands, and publishers on how to connect ad impressions directly to transaction-level sales data, unlocking what McKinsey estimates as $1.3 trillion in enterprise value.
• Rich Isenberg (Atlanta): Drawing on more than 20 years of frontline cybersecurity experience—including as CISO at Truist and VP of information security at Capital One—he helps global organizations build proactive, enterprise-wide cyber resilience, from embedding security into cloud migrations and customer journeys to advising CEOs and boards on governing AI and agentic systems safely.
• Roland Rechtsteiner (Zurich): Known for reimagining how leading energy and materials companies create value through trading, with work spanning end-to-end trading transformations, new trading businesses and joint ventures, and the design of digital trading capabilities.
• Sarah Dahlgren (New York): Brings distinctive regulatory credibility to McKinsey’s Risk & Resilience Practice, drawing on a 25-year career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—including leading supervision of the largest US and foreign banks—to help global financial institutions navigate complex regulatory relationships, strengthen risk governance, and turn regulatory pressure into competitive advantage.
• Yassir Zouaoui (Casablanca): Leads McKinsey’s economic development work globally while serving as managing partner for Morocco and French-speaking Africa, advising governments, institutions, and investors on national growth strategies and large-scale transformations. His expertise spans competitiveness, investment strategy, public sector reform, and sustainable economic development.

We are proud of this group and expect their impact to grow—for clients, for the firm, and for the industries they help lead.