Former World Bank Vice President to Speak at UW April 14

In a resort hotel 73 years ago in New Hampshire's White Mountains, 44 countries conjured a financing vehicle that remains one of the most efficient uses of public finance ever devised. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) later became the cornerstone institution of the World Bank Group.

Former IBRD vice president and treasurer Kenneth Lay will speak at the University of Wyoming Friday, April 14, at 2 p.m. in the College of Business auditorium as part of the annual Sandberg Speaker Series.

Lay will discuss his work as vice president and treasurer of the IBRD, and discuss the history, current situation and future challenges facing IBRD, and the other "multilateral development banks" that have emulated its capital structure and operations. He is the current senior managing director of the Rock Creek Group in Washington, D.C.

Lay spent 28 years working with IBRD, a cornerstone institution of the World Bank Group that manages globally diversified portfolios of public and private assets for about 50 major institutional investors. He financed and managed the bank’s reserves and oversaw operations in emerging-market countries. Lay served as director for operations in several countries in Southeast Europe and as head of the bank’s financial sector expert practice.

Earlier in his career, he was an attorney with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, heading its Branch of Corporation Finance Enforcement and representing the agency in investigations and in litigation in administrative tribunals and the federal courts.

For the past 25 years, Lay has owned and supervised operations on White Creek Ranch in the northern Laramie Mountains in central Wyoming. The ranch is a hay and cattle operation.

He received his juris doctorate from George Washington University and his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College.

The event is sponsored by the Sandberg Speakers Fund, established in memory of Carl Sandberg, a UW graduate whose promising Wall Street career was cut short by cancer. The series brings speakers of national stature in the financial world to UW to broaden the perspective available to students and the community.