WHEN: Thursday 23 February 2023
6 pm – 6.30 pm: Wine reception in Chetwynd Room;
6.30 pm – 7.30 pm: Talk in Keynes Lecture Theatre
This event is under Chatham House Rule
What to look forward to:
In this fireside chat, Laurel will discuss her relationship with entrepreneurship, leading the launch of M&S Money brand, her experience in Uber, and trends in biotech that she see from her positions in CUHP and the Biomedical Campus. She will also reflect her personal journey, leadership style and what she see are the critical success factors when leading a business.
About the speaker:
Laurel Powers-Freeling has had a long and varied career, starting with professional services at both McKinsey & Company and Morgan Stanley. She’s held senior management and board level positions at UK FTSE 100 companies, including the Prudential, Abbey Life, Lloyds Bank Group and Marks & Spencer, where she launched M&S Bank and also was responsible for M&S’s first steps into on-line retailing. At American Express, she was responsible for UK and European operations, and also launched a unique product—The Red Card—which she developed in partnership with Bono (as in U2 Bono) as part of his Project Red, which raises funds for addressing AIDS, Malaria and other health challenges in Africa. She was appointed a Non-Executive Director of the Bank of England, and has served as a Senior Advisor since.
Laurel has been involved with some twenty boards as a non-executive director, including Bank of Ireland, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Atom Bank. Laurel was a part of the start-up of Atom. She is currently Chair of Uber in the UK, which serves some 7 million riders, working with 90,000 drivers. Elsewhere in the digital space, she chairs Moneybox, and app-based savings and investment platform which, as of this week, now has over 1 million customers, and Ripe Thinking, a specialist insurance platform.
In Cambridge, Laurel chairs Cambridge Biomedical Campus Ltd., which focuses on life sciences growth and developing the Biomedical Campus for the future.
Finally, she’s married to Dr Anthony Freeling, our acting University Vice Chancellor. They have two daughters: one is a senior engineer at Google in Silicon Valley, and the other is a Sustainability Lead for Handelsbanken, a leading European bank.