Ken Kencel serves as president and CEO of Churchill Asset Management, an affiliate of Nuveen, the asset management arm of TIAA, a Fortune 100 financial services company. He also serves as chairman of the board, president and CEO of Nuveen Churchill Direct Lending Corp, Churchill’s publicly registered business development company. Churchill is among the most active private capital managers in the US, annually investing approximately $11 billion in over 375 distinct transactions.

Throughout his over 35-year career in the investment industry, Kencel has accrued a broad range of experience in leading private credit investment businesses. Previously, Kencel 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. Kencel was also a founder of the high-yield finance business at Chase Securities (now JPMorgan 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.

Kencel graduated with a BS in business administration, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University and a JD 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, the investment committee of Canisius High School (a private Jesuit Preparatory school in Buffalo, NY), and the advisory board of Teach for America (Connecticut). Kencel is a former member of the board of advisors and adjunct professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University