PALIO
Our Team
Suzanne Sarka
Founder, CEO & Principal, Palio Capital, LLC and the
PALIO Impact Capital Platform™
Ms. Sarka has been structuring, trading and “building” across markets as part of large financial institutions/banks and independently in her own company and earlier co-founded hedge fund since 1988. She brings a uniquely diverse set of skills spanning taxable and tax-exempt fixed income, structured products, mortgages/CMOs/ABS, currencies & commodities, Global EMG, credit & interest rate derivatives structuring & trading, CBO/CDO’s, real estate and infrastructure, private equity, and portfolio risk management. She leverages these ‘tools’ to build across taxable, tax-exempt, public and philanthropic balance sheets for projects she believes can affect change and address policy.
The PALIO Impact Capital Platform is the result of Ms. Sarka’s past twenty-two years, applying the financial toolbox she gained during her years on Wall Street to structuring and building funding solutions involving public and private equity and debt financing for projects she believed could affect change - the basis for forming Palio Capital, LLC in 2000.
Prior to forming Palio, Suzanne headed financial institutions for the Derivatives & Financial Products group at Societe Generale. Before this, she helped found and build the global fixed-income structured derivative products effort at Salomon Brothers as a Vice-President on Salomon’s Fixed Income Derivatives Trading Desk at age 25. Suzanne began her career at Goldman Sachs in Mortgage Trading & Finance, moving into J. Aron to help build GS’s currency & commodity structured derivatives products business (CCIP) under Tim O’Neill and Lloyd Blankfein.
Ms. Sarka holds a B.A. in International Relations and Secondary Major in Economics from Stanford University
BIO
Lola Dare McAllister
Impact Investment Analyst
Lola McAllister is a third year undergraduate student at Stanford University studying Sociology, Anthropology and Latin American Studies.
She joined PALIO in April of 2022 as the organization’s first in-house intern and Impact Investment Analyst. At PALIO, Lola works closely with Founder and CEO, Suzanne Sarka, launching PALIO Impact Funding Accelerator’s flagship Education & Homeownership Program (EHOP) and Sustainability Program.
As the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Project Matriarchs, the youngest member of a national consortium of care leaders; a founding member of the Mutualist Society; project manager for Stanford’s Social Entrepreneurial Students Association (SENSA)’s consulting service; as well as having interned with and consulted for numerous social enterprise startups, Lola has extensive experience in the nonprofit and social innovation sectors.
Lola joined PALIO in order to understand how financial structuring and the capital markets can contribute meaningfully to social change work.
She is at her happiest working alongside passionate people with ambitious impact-oriented visions.