Catherine A. Allen

Catherine A. Allen

Founder and Chair of the Board, Board Risk Committee

For more than 30 years, Catherine A. Allen has been an outstanding leader in technology strategy and financial services and a key thought leader in business innovation. Catherine Allen is Founder and Chair of the Board Risk Committee, a nonprofit aiming to foster more effective enterprise risk management and board oversight. She was a former corporate executive at Dun and Bradstreet and Citicorp, and has served as a public, private and nonprofit board director. She is known as an outstanding leader in technology strategy, innovation and thought leadership for boards, especially in the areas of emerging technologies and risks and risk management. She was Founder and Chair of The Santa Fe Group/Shared Assessments, which she recently sold to OneTrust, and was Founder and CEO of BITS, part of the Financial Services Roundtable, for ten years. She served on the public boards of Synovus Financial, El Paso Electric Company, Stewart Information Services, and NBS Technologies. She currently serves on the boards of the New Mexico State Investment Council, the New York Institute of Technology and a number of corporate and nonprofit boards. She is on the Advisory Board of the Executive Women’s Forum and the Audit Committee at Women Corporate Directors. She was acknowledged by NACD as one of the 100 Most Influential Directors in 2018. She is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Missouri, where she also received the highest award for alumnae service. She is the author of four books and lives between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Cape Cod, with her husband, Paul Rooker.