Margaret Eyres

Before joining Commerzbank in 2017 she was a senior civil servant in Whitehall, recruited as the first ever Head of Direct Lending for UK Export Finance (UKEF), the UK’s export credit agency. There she led a team responsible for a £3 billion programme launched by the then Chancellor George Osborne to ensure foreign buyers of British capital goods and services for viable projects could always obtain long term finance.

Margaret’s detour into the public sector followed 17 years with an award-winning global export finance team at Société Générale in both Paris and London. She built up experience representing her niche export finance industry in both European and British banking associations in order to lobby governments and EU institutions to favour exporters in times of regulatory change. In the past couple of years she has been on the International Chamber of Commerce’s Export Finance IBOR Transition Working Group.

Overall Margaret’s banking and finance career has spanned over 41 years since joining Midland Bank International. Throughout she has tended to be on the real economy, cross-border side of banking with an early focus on trade services, trade finance and relationship management before developing longer term export finance. Her varied lending experience has covered both corporate and sovereign borrowers in developed and emerging markets across Africa, Central Asia and Latin America across a broad range of industrial sectors.

In 2018 she was elected to the University's Alumni Advisory Board, during which she was a very proactive member and spearheaded an international trade event at The Shard in London for her fellow School alumni in January 2019. The success of this prompted a second event focusing on the US trade market. She has volunteered as a mentor to recent graduates who are seeking a career in the banking industry, helping them with their interview techniques and encouraging them in their career development.