Kenneth Lay, Senior Managing Director

Kenneth Lay is a Senior Managing Director at RockCreek. Before joining the firm, he served as Treasurer of The World Bank, where he and his colleagues managed more than $100 billion in investments for the World Bank, other international financial institutions, and more than 40 of the World Bank’s member countries’ central banks, sovereign wealth and pension funds. Ken also led the World Bank Treasury’s banking and capital markets programs as they delivered financing and risk management for the World Bank itself. He extended their reach to provide these services directly to the Bank’s member countries and their instrumentalities and introduced green bonds and catastrophe bonds to deepen the institution’s engagement in climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

At other stages in his World Bank career, Ken served as a country director in Latin America and Southeastern Europe and headed the World Bank’s financial sector practice, where he developed—with colleagues at the IMF—the Financial Sector Assessment Program that remains a cornerstone of international efforts to monitor and improve the health of countries’ banking and capital markets. In an earlier stint in the World Bank Treasury, he conceived and led the issuance of the first “global bond,” which has become a principal vehicle for sovereign and supranational financing in international markets.

Before joining the World Bank, Ken was an enforcement lawyer with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where he headed the branch of corporation finance enforcement.

Ken currently serves as chair of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm), and he is a member of the Advisory Group of Financial Experts of the Global Environment Facility and, the Investment Funds Committee of the State of Wyoming (overseeing the State’s $25+ billion sovereign wealth fund). He continues to work with international institutions, private foundations, and NGOs in efforts to develop new approaches to increasing the scale and reducing the cost of financing for global public goods.

Ken holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from the George Washington University, the CFA designation, and active membership in the State Bar of California.