Laura Cole

Managing Director, Head of HR UK, and Europe at Standard Chartered

Laura is the Managing Director, Head of HR UK, and Europe where she leads the HR function for the Europe and UK region. She is also accountable for implementing the Bank’s Employee Experience Strategy and is responsible for designing better experiences for colleagues across the end-to-end employee journey. She has recently led Standard Chartered’s Future Workplace Now programme, delivering flexible working at scale to 28 of the Bank’s markets, covering 70% of the workforce globally.

Laura’s background is a blend of HR digital transformation, employee experience and operational HR. She has extensive implementation experience of enterprise wide HR technology deployments across multiple geographies with varying employee size and complexity.

Laura spent over five years working in Hong Kong with BT (British Telecom) and held a variety of senior HR roles during this time. She relocated to Singapore in June 2017 to join Standard Chartered and has very recently moved back to the UK after 10 years overseas. Laura is passionate about the digitisation agenda in HR and what the advent of AI and robotics means for the future of work, consumerisation of HR services and the employee experience.