Mark Bailey and Alison Higgins on supporting the LGBTQ+ community within Standard Chartered and beyond

myGwork recently had the opportunity to feature Mark Bailey and Alison Higgins, Executive Sponsors of SC Pride, from Standard Chartered’s global employee resource group (ERG) for LGBTQ+ colleagues and allies, in Attitude. In this interview, Mark and Alison openly discussed their experiences with the LGBTQ+ community and the evolution of their support, shaped by their family, friendships, and workplace environments.

"Please tell us a bit about your career journey.

Mark Bailey: My career has always been in finance. At 13, on our way to a football match, my uncle suggested I should be a Chief Financial Officer (CFO). His point being that every boardroom tends to have an accountant, and I was good at maths. The FTSE 100 was a glamorous financial update on the news at the time and so my quest began. To become the CFO of a FTSE 100 company. I have not reached my destination yet, I may never reach it, but I can say hand on heart that I love my current role as the CFO of Corporate and Investment Banking at Standard Chartered. And I have been lucky to have met some amazing people on the way who have helped me develop in a professional sense.

Alison Higgins: I’m currently the Global Head of Control for Markets and the Head of Markets for UK, Europe and Americas at Standard Chartered. I knew from the age of 14/15 that I wanted to be a trader, although I didn’t really have any clue what that actually entailed. Nonetheless, I did my work experience in my University holidays on the LIFFE (London International Financial Future and Options Exchange) floor, which was one of the last open outcry floors in London. After I graduated, I moved to Singapore and, through social networking (think more pub social than Meta), got a junior role on a trading floor. That gave me some great exposure to trading G10 (top most traded currencies) and some brilliant secondments in Tokyo and Zurich. After about nine years I then jumped at an opportunity to move to New York to help rebuild our short date dollar desk.

After three years in NYC, I headed back to London before relocating again to follow my husband to Abu Dhabi where I ran trading for a local bank. Nine year later, and with a young family, we decided to move back to the UK where I reached a crossroads in my career: what next? Try something completely different that would enhance my career in the longer term, or stay in trading? It was meeting my current boss that made the decision relatively easy, as it was important to me to work for someone who saw my skill set and wanted to leverage that to fix problems. This is when I took on the Global Head of Controls role, which is very different to trading."

You can read the full interview article with myGwork on Attitude here.