Ken Kencel

President & CEO at Churchill Asset Management

Speaker

Ken serves as President and CEO of Churchill Asset Management, an affiliate of Nuveen, the asset management arm of TIAA, a Fortune 500 financial services company. He also serves as Chairman of the Board, President and CEO of Nuveen Churchill Direct Lending Corp. (NYSE: NCDL) and Nuveen Churchill Private Capital Income Fund (PCAP), Churchill’s publicly registered business development companies.

Churchill currently manages over $50 billion in committed capital and focuses on providing senior, unitranche and junior debt financing and making equity co-investments and fund commitments to leading private equity investment firms and their portfolio companies. Churchill is among the most active private capital managers in the U.S., annually investing approximately $11+ billion in over 250 distinct transactions.

Throughout his over 35-year career in the investment industry, he has accrued a broad range of experience in leading private credit investment businesses. Previously, Ken served as a Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, where he also served as President and a Director of Carlyle Secured Lending, Inc. (Carlyle’s publicly traded business development company). Prior to that he founded and was President and CEO of Churchill Financial Group, served as Head of Leveraged Finance for Royal Bank of Canada and was Head of Indosuez Capital, a leading middle market merchant banking and asset management business in partnership with Credit Agricole Group. Ken was also a founder of the high yield finance business at Chase Securities (now JP Morgan Chase). He began his career in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Drexel Burnham Lambert. He regularly appears as a guest commentator on private credit markets on Bloomberg, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. In 2023, Ken was named by Private Debt Investor as “One of the 30 ChangeMakers” who helped shape the private debt industry over the past decade.

Ken graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He serves on the Pension Investment Advisory Committee for the Archdiocese of New York, the Board of Trustees and Chairman of the Investment Committee of Canisius High School (a private Jesuit Preparatory school in Buffalo, NY), the Advisory Board of Teach for America (Connecticut), and the Milken Institute’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Asset Management Executive Council. Ken is a former member of the Board of Advisors and Adjunct Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.