As CEO of Open for Business, Dominic leads the organisation to produce and activate impactful research on the economic case for LGBTQ+ inclusion globally. Through his visits to Southeast Asia in 2023 and 2024, he has worked with business and civil society leaders to ensure the economic case could be an additional impactful tool used to better the lives of LGBTQ+ people in each country. Most recently, he was the keynote speaker at Philippine Financial and Inter-Industry Pride’s 2024 Pride Summit. 

Before joining Open for Business as CEO, Dominic was Chief Executive at Just Like Us, the charity dedicated to advancing young LGBTQ+ lives. Under his leadership, the organisation managed to reach more than half of all UK secondary schools with at least one of their programmes.

Matt is the Director of Communications at Open for Business. Matt has over twelve years' communications experience, six within leadership roles in sectors including sexual health, human rights and LGBTQ+ equalities at organisations including Liberty, akt (The Albert Kennedy Trust) and Terrence Higgins Trust. He has vast experience in media relations, partnership work and developing strategy and infrastructure for growing communications functions. These experiences will inform the comms strategy for Southeast Asia, ensuring the research is accessible and impactful across the region.

In January, Emma joined Open for Business from one of their business coalition partners on a pro-bono secondment. She is a project manager at a professional services firm, and joined Open for Business in January 2024 to project manage the production and launch of the Southeast Asia research. During 2024, she has spent 3 months living in Southeast Asia (with most of her time spent in Singapore). During this time, she has worked with civil society leaders, business leaders and embassies in each country to gather data and context for the research through surveys, interviews and events. She has used her network across the region to identify where this research is relevant and impactful, and has worked to identify partnerships in each country to ensure the successful activation of the research once launched.

As an out and proud business leader, Kathy has been promoting LGBT+ D&I throughout her career as a marketer and entrepreneur. Kathy is one of the appointed business leaders driving the Red Dot for Pink Dot campaign to advocate for other businesses to sponsor Pink Dot in order to promote greater understanding and inclusion of the LGBT+ community in Singapore.

Since 2020, Kathy has been on the Board of Outright International, a leading international queer human rights organisation, and serves as one of two Asia-based board directors and its current Board Co-Chair. In 2022, Kathy co-founded Q Chamber, Singapore’s LGBTQ+ and allied chamber of commerce. Kathy serves on the executive committee for Proud Spaces, Singapore's new LGBTQ+ community centre.

Moderated by Evan Lam (Partner at Linklaters and Co-Founder of Q Chamber), our panelists - Christina Chow (Global Product Head for Payment Channels at Deutsche Bank), Mark Bailey (CFO Corporate Commercial & Institutional Banking at Standard Chartered Bank), Michael Karimian (Director Digital Diplomacy Asia and the Pacific at Microsoft), Leow Yangfa (Executive Director at Oogachaga) and Matt Horwood (Director of Communications at Open for Business) - will share their reflections on the key takeaways to Open for Business's report on “The Economic Case for LGBTQ+ Inclusion in Southeast Asia”.