Ann Cairns

Chair and Independent Non-Executive Director

Ann is on the board of Lightrock, a global private equity platform investing in sustainable businesses. She is Chair of Financial Alliance for women, a global peer-to-peer network whose members work in more than 135 countries to build programmes that support women with access to capital, information, education and markets. She is also a member of the UK Government’s Artificial Intelligence Council. Ann has previously held board positions with ICE, AstraZeneca and Charity Bank and was the lead non-executive for BEIS, the UK Government’s department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Until December 2022, Ann served as the executive Vice Chair of Mastercard, having previously been President of International Markets for the company, responsible for the management of all customer-related activities in over 200 countries around the world. During her time at Mastercard, Ann’s role focused on building sustainable, strong growth rates across both mature and emerging markets and she led the company’s expansion into new territories. Before joining Mastercard, Ann led the Financial Services Group with Alvarez & Marsal in London and during that time was the CEO of Lehman Holdings in Europe during their Chapter 11 process.

Ann spent over 20 years in banking, predominately in the payments and FX businesses. She was the CEO of Transaction Banking at ABN-AMRO, following 15 years in senior operational positions at Citigroup. She ran the payments infrastructure of Citi across 103 countries with circa 6000 staff and she launched the first-ever electronic currency trading platform for Citi during her time in the investment bank.

Ann has a First Class Pure Mathematics degree and honorary doctorate from Sheffield University and a M.Sc. with research into medical statistics and honorary doctorate from Newcastle University. She is also a fellow of London Business School.