The financial system is global in ways that its institutions are often not. Capital moves across borders faster than the governance frameworks designed to contain it. Climate risk does not respect national regulatory perimeters. The structural barriers that prevent women from accessing business finance in one country tend to recur, in recognisably similar forms, in countries that share little else. Dame Alison Rose has spent three decades working inside a major UK bank, as explored here, and a significant portion of that time was spent confronting exactly this gap between the global nature of the problems and the national or institutional nature of the responses. Her current work reflects a sustained effort to close it.
Rose’s international exposure began in earnest during her years as Head of Leveraged Finance for the UK and Europe, and deepened as she took on the role of Head of Europe, Middle East and Africa for NatWest’s Global Investment Bank. These were positions that required understanding not only financial markets but the regulatory, cultural, and political environments that shape how those markets operate in different jurisdictions. The breadth of that experience became a foundation for the cross-border work she would undertake later, when the scope of her role expanded from managing transactions to shaping policy.
Building a Climate Finance Architecture
Rose was a founding member of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, the coalition known as GFANZ, which was assembled in 2021 to align the commitments of financial institutions across the world around shared climate targets. At its launch, the Alliance represented institutions with oversight of trillions in assets, and it brought together banks, insurers, pension funds, and asset managers under a framework designed to translate broad climate ambitions into specific, measurable financial commitments. The work required something that purely domestic policy conversations rarely demand: the capacity to build consensus across institutions operating in different regulatory regimes, under different fiduciary obligations, with different political environments at home.
Rose also served as co-chair of the UK Government’s Energy Efficiency Taskforce and as a member of the Net Zero Council, contributing to the domestic architecture while maintaining engagement at the international level. She has spoken about the importance of reaching smaller businesses in the transition to net zero, noting that the SME sector, which accounts for a substantial share of economic activity in most countries, is rarely well served by climate finance frameworks designed for large corporates. Effective global climate finance, in her view, has to work at the level of the whole economy, not only its most visible participants.
The Investing in Women Code Goes International
The most concrete demonstration of Dame Alison Rose on finance across borders is the international expansion of the Investing in Women Code. The Code, which she helped establish following the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship in 2019, is a voluntary commitment mechanism that asks UK financial institutions to improve female founders’ access to capital and to report annually on their progress. By 2023, it had more than 250 signatories and had contributed to a tripling of the rate at which women were starting businesses in the UK.
The structure of the Code proved transferable. Through the Financial Alliance for Women’s partnership with the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, a framework derived from the Code is now being rolled out in 28 countries, with support from the World Bank. Rose became Board Chair of the Financial Alliance for Women in 2025, a role that places her at the centre of an effort to extend the logic of the UK initiative into markets where the barriers to female entrepreneurship take locally specific forms. Her position is that the economic argument for closing the gender finance gap does not vary by geography: capital directed toward overlooked market segments finds returns that prior market conditions had left uncaptured, in Nairobi as in Newcastle.
Private Equity as a Cross-Border Instrument
At Charterhouse (see her Charterhouse role), where Rose joined as a Senior Partner in 2024, the investment focus is primarily European. The firm’s history, stretching back to its founding in 1934, encompasses investments across the UK, France, and the broader European market. Rose’s role on the Executive Committee, Investment Committee, and Portfolio Committee positions her to apply a career’s worth of cross-border financial experience to a firm that has always operated with a European rather than purely domestic lens.
What Dame Alison Rose brings to that work is a particular understanding of how political and regulatory conditions shape investment value across jurisdictions, developed through decades of operating in markets that react differently to the same underlying economic forces. The global perspective she has built, through GFANZ, through the international expansion of the Investing in Women Code, and through years of senior roles spanning EMEA, is not incidental to her value as an investor. Her full background is at damealisonrose.co.uk. It is one of the central things she carries into every investment conversation she joins.
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