What is Colleen Ebbett's background before JPMorgan Chase, and how does it shape her approach to inclusive economic growth?
Before joining JPMorgan Chase five years ago, Colleen Ebbett held a senior policy advisory role on impact investment within the UK government's Inclusive Economy Unit. Prior to that, she worked in impact investing focused on health in Sub-Saharan Africa, and spent nearly a decade as a banker at JPMorgan in Switzerland and the United States. This uncommon combination of private banking, international development finance, and public-sector policy work gives her the ability to move fluidly between the private, public, and social sectors — a rare vantage point that directly shapes her current mission.
That cross-sector fluency is not incidental — it is the foundation of her credibility. In her current role at JPMorgan Chase, Ebbett oversees the firm's small business philanthropy, which sits at the intersection of all three worlds she has inhabited. She operates within a firm that has deployed over $2 billion into CDFIs in the United States over more than two decades, and has provided over £1 billion in senior financing to SME lenders in the UK in the past five years alone. Her background makes her well-placed to position JPMorgan Chase's philanthropic commitments — including the £4 million capacity-building initiative announced in November 2024 with Responsible Finance — not as charity, but as strategic investment in systemic infrastructure. You can hear her explain this directly in this episode on Listenly.
"For economic growth to reach all areas of the country, particularly underserved or under-invested regions, it has to be intentionally inclusive."
Colleen Ebbett — JPMorgan Chase, The Responsible Finance Podcast
Daniel Davis joined First Enterprise on 2 January 2024, bringing a background shaped by digital transformation, operational improvement, and hands-on SME support. His experience spans working directly within businesses and running his own operations — a dual perspective that gives him practical, ground-level insight into the challenges small businesses face when navigating growth.
At First Enterprise — a CDFI (Community Development Finance Institution) dedicated to serving underserved communities — Davis arrived with a clear mandate: sharpen the organisation's operations so it can deploy capital more efficiently and deepen its impact. His expertise in process improvement makes him a direct beneficiary and advocate of the kind of capacity-building support that initiatives like JPMorgan Chase's £4 million programme through Responsible Finance are designed to provide.
In this episode, Davis speaks to the real-world effect of "capital plus capacity" — the idea that funding alone is insufficient without the operational infrastructure to use it well. His perspective, shaped by experience with many different types of SMEs, lends particular weight to discussions about what CDFIs genuinely need to serve their communities at scale.