Eric Postel

SVP, DAI

Eric Postel is an economic development leader with a distinguished record both as a public servant and as a private sector executive. At DAI, Eric leads its client and technical teams serving corporate, finance and donor clients around the world. After working in the private sector for more than 25 years, Eric was asked to serve in senior leadership positions with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2011 to 2017 to help improve development effectiveness. In the final two years of his tenure, as Associate Administrator, he took on the interim role of Acting Deputy Administrator. As Assistant Administrator for the Africa Bureau (2014–2015), he led agency operations in Africa, notably including creation of the Bureau’s Ebola Unit and supervision of Power Africa. As Assistant Administrator for the Economic Growth, Education, and Environment (E3) Bureau, Eric led an organization that provided technical leadership to 100 USAID offices across 14 subject matter areas. He particularly championed domestic resource mobilization as a means of assisting developing nations on their journey to self-reliance, and he played a key role, accordingly, in adoption of the Addis Tax Initiative. He was recalled to public service during the Biden Administration: initially to build partnerships with the private sector to respond to COVID and then to work on private sector projects in the Caribbean. Eric’s U.S. domestic economic development experience was gained making clean energy investments across Wisconsin for a state-funded impact investment fund and serving on the Board of Directors of a rural SBA 504 lender. Before founding his own investment banking firm, Eric worked as a vice president at Citibank Tokyo, where he arranged financing for borrowers on four continents. In 1988, Eric devised a $30 million financing for Jamaica International Telecommunications Limited (JAMINTEL) from Japanese investors which was the first international securitization of future receivables without a corporate guaranty – this structure has subsequently served as the basis of more than $80 billion worth of financings. Eric was an officer for four years in the U.S. Navy. He holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Wesleyan University.