DFID Management Board Membership
Biography: Doreen Langston, Non Executive Director
Doreen graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Physics qualified as an accountant with
Arthur Andersen in 1980. She spent 3 years within its financial services
practice and left to become a lecturer in Accounting and Finance at Chart Foulks
Lynch Ltd for four years. Between 1984 and 1987, she worked at Robson Rhodes, an
accountancy firm, as a Senior Audit and Training Manager.
Doreen came into the City after Big Bang in the late 1980s. She initially joined HSBC in 1987 as an Internal Audit Manager and went on to have a successful ten-year career there. On return from maternity leave in 1989, Doreen was offered a role within James Capel (effectively, the equities house of HSBC at the time), where she stayed for a further 10 years.
At HSBC, Doreen held a number of senior management roles in Internal Audit, Operations, Settlements and Finance. Her most notable achievement was establishing the bank’s ‘Financial Services Internal Audit’ division in London. At the time of James Capel’s merger with Samuel Montagu, Doreen worked on bringing the two businesses together into a single investment banking operation. By the time she left, Doreen was appointed Chief Accountant HSBC Investment Bank Plc responsible for all of its financial functions.
In 1997, Doreen began work as a Company Director / Chief Operating Officer at Peregrine Securities Ltd in London. During the year she spent there, Doreen’s responsibilities comprised of finance, operations, risk, regulatory reporting, IT, compliance and human resources. She was involved in buying, selling and eventually liquidating various parts of the business during its handover to Banco Santander. Whilst the securities firm’s London operation had been profitable, the closure of the Hong Kong office made the merger with Santander inevitable. Doreen stayed on at Santander until the Asian crisis in 1998.
Between 1998 and 1999, Doreen completed several freelance assignments, amongst them Financial Controller at Abbey National Treasury Services where she covered the maternity leave of one of its team members.
In 1999, Doreen joined Omiris Capital Ltd as a Chief Financial Officer. Omiris was a telecommunications and technology-based start-up company that supported cross-border share dealing. Doreen steered the company through three funding rounds with venture capitalists before it was sold to a US owner in 2001.
Since 2001, Doreen has been working as the Finance Director and Head of Operations of Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe Ltd, a medium-sized UK securities operation of a Japanese bank. Her current duties encompass finance, regulatory reporting, product control, tax, treasury and operations with a team of sixty staff. Her technical background and prior experience has meant that she was appointed to chair the IT Steering Committee, as well as being made a member of the Risk and Executive Committees.
Doreen initially joined Daiwa as the Head of Finance and later was asked to take on some of the operational functions. Her managerial responsibilities are currently split 50/50 between operations and finance. Doreen is the first female Director at Daiwa.
As an aside to her executive commitments, Doreen became involved in Calculus Capital Ltd in 1999. Calculus was a start-up fund manager founded by some of her former Peregrine colleagues. Until 2005, Doreen was a Company Director with specific responsibility for Compliance.
Doreen has been a Council member of the University of Surrey since January 2007. She was a member of the Audit Committee from February 2006 and has been the chairperson since January 2008.
