Allen’s work was informed by more than 30 years of experience as a consultant and executive at leading financial services companies.

Before co-founding Glenbrook, he worked in new product development, channel strategies, and pricing in the point-of-sale, eCommerce, mobile commerce, and money transfer markets. Allen worked at First Data Corporation as senior vice president of product management and marketing with overall responsibility for POS, ecommerce, and back office products in First Data’s multi-billion dollar merchant processing business.

Before joining FDC, Allen was a vice president at Visa USA, where he oversaw global interchange strategy and new market development. He served as Senior Manager in Accenture’s Strategic Services practice, where he led strategic planning, operations, marketing, and product development engagements and was one of the firm’s worldwide payments experts. In addition, he was a co-founder and vice president of business development at a business-to-business exchange serving 50,000 client companies.

Allen’s area of focus at Glenbrook was the rapidly changing landscape of physical, remote, and omnichannel products and technologies from the merchant, processor, consumer, payment system, fintech perspectives. He worked with dozens of the largest merchants and their technology providers, as well as the credit, debit and EFT card networks, acquirers, mobile networks, and private equity investors focused on emerging payments opportunities.

Allen also spent an increasingly large percentage of his time working with tier 1 payment acceptors on their long-term payment strategies. His international efforts focused on financial inclusion initiatives in developing markets (Africa, India, etc.) and the creation of sustainable merchant ecosystems that serve “bottom of the pyramid” users in order to make eMoney spendable.

Allen was the Partner in Charge of Glenbrook’s Merchant Payments Roundtable program.

Allen formally retired from Glenbrook in April 2022, but remains an important friend and advisor to the firm.