Kenneth Allen
Certified Professional, CliftonStrengths Certified, DEI in the Workplace
Kenneth Allen has over thirty years of experience in business strategy development, investment banking, corporate finance and capital raising. He has advised and supported companies and entrepreneurs around the United States and in countries from the Caribbean to West Africa and South Africa as they strive to build new enterprises, expand their companies and create lasting generational wealth.
Kenneth is the Co-Director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the Los Angeles Urban League. In that role, he provides oversight for a number of core relationships for the Los Angeles Urban League including with the SBA and the MBDA, as well as partnerships with local CDFIs. He also leads key administrative and team development efforts for the Entrepreneurship Center.
In addition to his role at the Los Angeles Urban League, Kenneth is the founder of Azurest Partners, a financial advisory firm which provides investment banking and program management services to emerging companies and SMEs across North America. His prior experience includes senior roles at Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase’s Investment Bank. At Lehman Brothers, Kenneth was a Senior Vice President. He covered clients in the business services, telecommunications / information services, financial technology and the Internet/technology sectors. His clients included Accenture, Affiliated Computer Services (now Xerox), Checkfree (now Fiserv), Electronic Data Systems (now Hewlett Packard), IBM, Insurance Services Office (now Verisk) and Perot Systems. Kenneth has been involved in over $4 billion equity and debt capital raising transactions as well as over $1 billion in M&A engagements on behalf of his clients.
He served as a Chief Administrative Officer in Lehman Brothers’ Mortgage Capital division. He supported technology planning and management across the five mortgage origination subsidiaries which comprised the division. Kenneth was one of the leaders in the development of Lehman’s offshoring strategy for its mortgage origination capability, ultimately leading to the creation of and successful operating model for the largest component of Lehman Brothers’ Mumbai facility (over 800 employees involved in mortgage processing, mortgage applicant data verification and research).
At JP Morgan Chase, he was a Global Business Manager, overseeing planning and administration, compliance, management reporting and strategic projects for various departments in the Investment Bank. He co-led initiatives including a Peoplesoft-based project for headcount tracking and forecasting across the institutional businesses at JP Morgan Chase (representing over 120,000 employees) as well as efforts to implement technology-based operating models across the Investment Bank’s human resources division. He earned a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and has an MBA and MA in Education from Stanford University.