Board of Directors

Chair, UK-ASEAN Business Council

Ed Vaizey was appointed to the UK House of Lords in September 2020, where he sits as a Conservative Peer and is a Member of the Communications and Digital Committee.

Ed was the Member of Parliament for Wantage between 2005 and 2019. He served as the UK Government Culture and Digital Minister from 2010-16 and is the longest-serving Minister in that role. He was appointed a privy councillor in 2016.

Ed served as Trade Envoy to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between 2017 and 2019.

Vice Chair, UK-ASEAN Business Council and General Manager, Head of Commercial Banking UK, HSBC

Stuart Tait was appointed Head of Commercial Banking UK in December 2021 and is responsible for HSBC’s relationships with 900,000 large, medium and small business clients.

He is a General Manager at HSBC Group, one of the world‘s largest banking and financial services organisations with assets of nearly US$3 trillion.

Before his current role, Stuart was Regional Head of Commercial Banking for Asia Pacific, the leading international wholesale bank in the region and one of the Group‘s fastest-growing franchises.

Stuart has worked in financial services for over 30 years. He joined HSBC in 1984 as an International Manager and has held various positions in Commercial Banking, Global Banking and Markets, Retail Banking and Wealth Management, Human Resources and Risk. Previous assignments with HSBC have been based in various Asia markets, the Middle East, the US, Canada and in the Group‘s Head Office.

Chief Executive, UK-ASEAN Business Council

Ian was appointed CEO of the UK-ASEAN Business Council in September 2020. Before taking up this position, he had held a variety of roles across government including British Consul General in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Deputy Consul General and Director of UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) in Dubai, Deputy Director of UKTI in India, Senior Private Secretary to the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) Secretaries of State (Alistair Darling, Alan Johnson, and Patricia Hewitt) and Director of Business Development with the MWW Group in New York working in public relations.

Before this, he spent – 4.5 years – also in New York – as head of Invest UK’s Regional Inward Investment Team (the British Government’s agency responsible for attracting inward investment from the United States to the UK).

Chief Executive, ACCA

Helen Brand is chief executive of ACCA, the global body for professional accountants, a post she has held since 2008.

Helen has built her career within professional bodies and has considerable experience and knowledge of the 178 markets in which ACCA currently operates. She was a founding member of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and played a role in its successor organisations. She participates in several university advisory boards.

Helen is a member of the UK government’s Professional and Business Services Council, and she was appointed to the UK DBT’s Trade Advisory Group on Professional Advisory Services in August 2020. In 2022, under India’s leadership, she joined the B20 Task Force on the future of Work, Skills and Mobility and in June 2023 she joined the Board of the UK-ASEAN Business Council (UKABC).

One of the few women to lead a global professional body, Helen is a regular media commentator on the role ethics and the delivery of public value play in business and society. In 2011, ACCA became the first international professional body to publish an integrated report on its performance and Helen remains a strong advocate for the power of wider corporate reporting. She has also driven ACCA’s pioneering work in supporting the development of the profession across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Helen holds a BA in Politics from the University of Exeter. She was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in June 2011 for services to accountancy and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter in December 2017.

Country Chairman Myanmar & Cambodia, Matheson & Co Limited

After graduating from Bristol University, Peter joined PwC’s London office and qualified as an ICAEW Chartered Accountant in 1981. Post qualification he spent over 20 years with the Jardine Matheson group working in several senior finance and management roles in Asia and the Middle East. In 2014 Peter was re-engaged by Jardine Matheson to head the group’s development of its business portfolio in Myanmar and Cambodia.

Director, External Affairs, JCB

Philip has travelled extensively on a global basis and has dealt with numerous hands-on international trade and finance scenarios, specializing in infrastructure solutions. Philip joined JCB in 2002 to bring the Chinese market into JCB’s global strategy. Currently based in London covering international diplomatic liaison, with particular emphasis on India and global account relations.

Group Director of Government Relations, Prudential plc

Matthew Cavanagh joined Prudential plc in March 2013. He became Group Director of Government Relations in October 2013, overseeing the Government Relations function at Prudential’s Group Head Office in London.

Before joining Prudential, he was Head of Public Affairs at the John Lewis Partnership. From 2003-2010 he worked in a series of positions in the UK Government, as a special adviser to the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and from 2007-2010 as a special adviser to the Prime Minister.

Previously he spent several years at the Boston Consulting Group, and before that as a Lecturer in Philosophy at St Catherine’s College Oxford. He holds an MA, a BPhil, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Matt serves on the Board of Directors of the UK-ASEAN Business Council and the Board of Trustees of Asia House. He is Chair of the ASEAN Market Advisory Group at TheCityUK.

Vice Chairman ASEAN, Standard Chartered Bank

Rino Donosepoetro was appointed as Standard Chartered’s Vice Chairman for ASEAN in October 2019. In this role, he is responsible for driving the execution of the Bank’s ASEAN strategy and providing governance oversight over the Bank’s footprints that span across all 10 ASEAN countries. Before this, he held the role of CEO for Standard Chartered Bank Indonesia since September 2016 and he was the first Indonesian to hold this post in the Bank’s 157 years of operations in the country.

In a global career spanning 24 years with Standard Chartered, Mr Donosepoetro has held diverse roles across businesses and functions in different markets – Indonesia, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, and the Falkland Islands. He joined the Bank as a Graduate Trainee and started his career with Consumer Banking in Indonesia before moving to London in 2001 to take up the role of Executive Assistant to Group CEO. He then joined the Europe Corporate Banking team and subsequently the Consumer Banking team for the Middle East & South Asia out of Dubai in 2004. As Project Director for the Bank’s Group M&A in London, he led Standard Chartered’s successful acquisition of Permata Bank in Indonesia and American Express Bank in the US.

Rino Donosepoetro spent four years from 2010 as the Bank’s Regional Head of Internal Audit for Asia based in Singapore. Before being CEO of Indonesia, Mr Donosepoetro also held the role of CEO for Standard Chartered Bank in the Falkland Islands and Brunei Darussalam.

In addition to his current role, Mr Donosepoetro is the President Commissioner for Standard Chartered Bank Indonesia and the Bank’s Sustainable Finance champion for ASEAN & South Asia. He also sits on several international Boards including the digital venture Nexus Company Ltd Singapore, UK-ASEAN Business Council, WEF APAC Regional Action Group for Sustainability and he was recently appointed as Vice Chairman of the British Chambers of Commerce Indonesia.

Chief Executive Officer, Oxford Business Group

Andrew Jeffreys is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Oxford Business Group (OBG), the global publishing, research and consultancy firm, which produces an authoritative series of annual country reports across 35 countries and territories in Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

An internationally regarded analyst, he is a regular guest on television and radio, including the BBC and CNN, and writes often for the regional and international media. He travelled with Prime Minister Cameron as a Delegate on several overseas trips, including trips to Asia, Mexico and India. In 2012, he was appointed to the Board of the UK-ASEAN Business Council.

He founded OBG in 1994 after leaving Oxford University, where he graduated from St Catherine’s College with an honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Over the last 20 years, the firm has built up a staff of almost 250 across four continents.

Deputy HM Trade Commissioner-ASEAN Board Observer

Sam joined the UK’s Department for International Trade in April 2019, where he is responsible for the trade and investment relationship between Southeast Asia and the UK. He is based in Singapore and leads a team of 90 staff across ASEAN based in British Embassies and diplomatic missions. Before joining DIT, Sam was on secondment to the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, where he was head of UK Science Policy and Relations.

Sam’s Civil Service career began in 2001 as a graduate working within the Business Department, where he ran a Minister’s Private Office before becoming Head of External Relations leading the Department’s relationships and engagement with business operations. He has also spent 6 years in Asia with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, boosting science and technology partnerships with Southeast Asia and China. Sam has a Masters in Biochemistry from the University of Bath and his structural biology research at Mount Sinai, New York, was published in the journal Science.

Senior Vice President, Pearson

Freya Thomas Monk is a Senior Vice President at Pearson plc, an FTSE 100 company specialising in education. Pearson employs over 20,000 people in over 70 countries including a strong presence in ASEAN nations. At Pearson, Freya is responsible for the global English language testing business and has successfully grown the business over the past five years to be a notable market player. Freya holds an MA from Oxford University and an MBA from INSEAD (Paris). She lives in London with her husband and three children and is Chair of Governors of a Lambeth primary school.