Irene Graham OBE

CEO, ScaleUp Institute

Irene is the founding CEO and a Board Director of the ScaleUp Institute, a private sector, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to 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. During her time there, she established, led and scaled several of the bank’s key client and product businesses across its Corporate and Institutional Banking division, and was involved in a number of major global M&A activities.

Her career has spanned Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia, including a period living in Singapore. During the height of the financial crisis, Irene was seconded to work across the UK banking industry, where she led the Business Finance Taskforce and Better Business Finance.

In these roles, she was instrumental in the development of initiatives such as the Business Growth Fund, SME Finance Monitor, Open Banking, the Small Business Act and UK Export Finance instruments.

She is a Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde and holds a range of non-executive director and advisory roles across the business and finance communities. She has also contributed to a number of national and international initiatives, including the Fintech Strategy Review, the Life Sciences Scale-Up Taskforce and the Creative Industries Council. She previously served on Canada’s National Research Industrial Advisory Council