Sir Kenneth Olisa OBE
Chair, BusinessLDN
“Do Well, Do Good”
Sir Kenneth Olisa OBE, the Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London to King Charles III.
Ken is Founder and Chairman of boutique technology merchant bank, Restoration Partners. Ken’s technology career spans over 40 years commencing with IBM and then as a senior executive at Wang Laboratories working in the UK, Belgium and the USA.
He has considerable public company Board-level experience on both sides of the Atlantic. The first British-born black man to be appointed as a Director of a FTSE 100 company (Reuters) he has also served on the Boards of Open Text, Thomson Reuters, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation and several AIM-listed businesses. Today he chairs a portfolio of high potential technology businesses including Inogesis (home to the Virtual Technology Cluster), Interswitch (Nigeria’s leading payments company) and Proxymity – (digital investor communications platform) Interswitch.
Ken is equally committed to public service and has been an NHS Trust Director, an inaugural member of regulators, Postal Service Commission and IPSA (Independent Parliamentary Standard Authority); and a Governor of the Peabody Trust. He is the founder of the Aleto Foundation; President of Thames Reach (for which he received an OBE in 2010); Chairman of Shaw Trust; and President of London Youth. In 2015 Her Majesty the Queen, appointed him as her Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London. He was knighted in 2018 for services to business and philanthropy and in 2021 he was appointed High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey and a Trustee of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund. On January 1st 2023, Ken became Chair of BusinessLDN (formerly known as London First.)
He captures his motivations in his official motto – ‘Do well. Do good.”