Irene is the founding CEO and a board director of the ScaleUp Institute, a private sector, not-for-profit company focused on making the UK the best place in the world to scale up a business.
She is a former senior banker at Standard Chartered where she held both European and global managing director roles. She set up, ran and scaled several of the bank’s key client and product businesses across its corporate and institutional bank and led several global M&A activities. Working internationally across Europe, the Americas, Middle East and Asia, living in Singapore for a period of time.
During the height of the financial crisis was seconded to work across the banking industry where she led the Business Finance Taskforce and Better Business Finance which was responsible for, amongst other initiatives, the founding of the Business Growth Fund, SME Finance Monitor, and leading on developments in Open Banking, and the Small Business Act.
She is a Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde University and holds a variety of non executive director and advisory roles across the creative, business and finance communities.This has included participating in the Fintech Strategy review; the Life Sciences Scaleup Taskforce; Creative Industry Councils and sitting on Canada’s National Research Industrial Advisory Council.
