Allen Miller

Allen Miller joined Oak HC/FT in 2019 and focuses on early-stage venture and growth equity in fintech and fintech-adjacent software. Many of the companies Allen works with are located in markets beyond the traditional hubs and with founders who don’t fit the classic archetypes.

Allen currently serves on the Boards of Aplazo, Cart, Cobre, Sendoso and 99minutos. He is also a Board Observer at Ethic.

Previously he was an investor at Matrix Partners where he was responsible for sourcing, evaluating and supporting early-stage investments in fintech and enterprise software.

Before becoming an investor, Allen started his career within McKinsey's High-Tech practice. First as an Associate and later as an Engagement Manager, Allen led a range of projects with financial services and enterprise software clients mostly around commercial topics like pricing, sales productivity, customer success, new market entry and M&A. 

Allen received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University, magna cum laude and an MBA from Columbia Business School, where he graduated with Dean's Honors.

During the depths of Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s, my mom left everything behind and immigrated to the US at age 18. She put herself through undergrad and dental school before founding a series of dental practices. Growing up, I watched as she helped patients, built a team, and ran the back office of a small business. Like any entrepreneur, her journey had ups and downs, and I got to see firsthand the grit and tenacity it takes to build something from scratch.

When I moved to New York after college and got my first paycheck, I knew very little about saving or investing. I couldn’t afford a wealth advisor - so, like everything else, I turned to the internet to find answers. I opened one of the first accounts with a startup called Betterment, which had a novel investing product and taught me a lot about personal finance. During business school a few years later, I ended up cold-emailing the Betterment founders, which led to an internship there. That experience accelerated what’s now become a career-long passion for fintech.

Fintech requires multi-dimensional thinking, because it's not enough to build a great product or apply the latest technology. You need to navigate regulation (country by country, state by state), protect customer data and privacy, and fight bad actors. Harder still is finding the right business model. There are many ways to create revenue in fintech, but not so many ways to keep it.Much of the untapped potential in fintech lies in "emerging" markets. Some are emerging in the traditional geographic sense - for example, Latin America is filled with many unmet financial needs. But markets can also emerge in a less traditional sense, as new fraud vectors exploit AI, entrenched industries like commerce and logistics open up to tech-enabled solutions, and state-sponsored payment rails (like PIX, UPI, and FedNow) create a need for new and usable payments infrastructure. All of these create real opportunities for ambitious entrepreneurs.