Alison Davis

Managing Partner, Fifth Era

Alison Davis is co-founder of Fifth Era (www.fifthera.com). She is an experienced corporate executive, public company board director, an active investor in growth companies and a best selling author on the topics of technology and innovation. For more information go to www.alisondavis.com.

Alison is currently a non-executive director of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) where she chairs the Technology and Innovation Committee, Fiserv (FISV), Unisys (UIS) and Ooma (OOMA) where she chairs the Audit Committee, and she serves as the Chairman of the Advisory Board for BlockChain Capital. She is a former director of City National Bank (CYC), Diamond Foods (DMND), First Data Corporation (FDC), Xoom (XOOM), and many private companies and was the Chairman of LECG (XPRT) until its sale in 2011. Alison is a frequent speaker on corporate governance.

Alison was previously the Managing Partner of Belvedere Capital, a regulated bank holding company and private equity firm focused on investing in US banks and financial services firms where she worked closely with the Federal Reserve, The OCC, the FDIC and various state banking regulators. Prior to this, Alison was the Chief Financial Officer of Barclays Global Investors (now BlackRock), the world’s largest institutional investment firm with more than $1.5 trillion of assets under management. Earlier in her career, Alison spent 14 years as a strategy consultant and advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs, boards and executive teams with McKinsey & Company, and as a practice leader with A.T. Kearney where she built and led the global Financial Services Practice.  She is the co-author of two best selling books “Build Your Fortune in the Fifth Era – How to Prosper in an Age of Unprecedented Innovation”, and “Corporate Innovation in the Fifth Era – Lessons from Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft”.

Alison is active in the community supporting non-profits and social enterprises as a board director, fundraiser and volunteer. She has been frequently named a “Most Influential Women in Business” by the San Francisco Business Times.  She received a B.A. Honors and a Master’s in Economics from Cambridge University in England, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business after completing the first-year at Harvard. She was born in Sheffield, UK, is now a dual US/UK citizen and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Matthew C. Le Merle, and their five children.


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