Dominic O'Connell

Why organisations work with Dominic O’Connell

• He chairs financial services flagship events at the level institutions trust with their reputation, including two editions of TISA’s Annual Flagship Conference.
• He interviews executives the way a working business journalist does, with the framing of someone who has spent twenty years inside UK corporate stories at The Sunday Times, the BBC and The Times.
• He won the Wincott Award in 2017, the most credible signal in UK business journalism, which buyers in financial services and the City recognise on sight.
• He moves between hosting, on-stage interviewing, and panel moderating without flattening any of them, which is what complex multi-stream conferences need.

Biography highlights

• Business presenter, Times Radio (from November 2021, the station’s first business correspondent).
• Saturday business columnist, The Times.
• Business presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme for five years from 2016, with regular appearances across BBC television.
• Business Editor, The Sunday Times, 2010 to 2016; joined the paper in 2001.
• Wincott Award winner, 2017.
• Contributing author on “Grit, Rigour & Humour: The INEOS Story” (Penguin, 2023), appraising the INEOS business alongside contributors including Sebastian Coe and Andrew Likierman.

Biography

UK business journalism has produced a small group of people who can chair a flagship financial services conference, interview a sitting CEO live on national radio, and write a Saturday newspaper column on the same week. Dominic O’Connell is one of them. He currently anchors business coverage on Times Radio and writes the Saturday business column for The Times.

Before Times Radio he spent five years as business presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, where corporate Britain went on the record before breakfast and where preparation and composure are the price of entry. He joined the BBC in 2016 from The Sunday Times, where he was business editor for six years and a senior writer on the paper from 2001.

The Wincott Award in 2017, UK business journalism’s premier prize, sits behind the work. So does a longer body of corporate reporting recognised inside the City and Westminster. In 2023 he was the journalist Penguin commissioned to appraise INEOS at twenty-five in “Grit, Rigour & Humour”, alongside contributors including Sebastian Coe and Andrew Likierman.

That track record is why financial services institutions hire him to chair the rooms where their boards, regulators and clients are watching. He has twice chaired TISA’s Annual Flagship Conference and has worked with firms including RSMR. The product is not a keynote thesis. It is a working business journalist running the room and keeping the agenda honest.

Key speaking topics

• UK and global business news
• Financial services and investment
• Equity markets and corporate strategy
• Macroeconomics and policy
• Corporate leadership and CEO interviews
• The City of London and UK plc

Ideal for

• Annual flagship conferences hosted by financial services trade bodies and asset managers
• Investor days, AGMs and capital markets events
• Corporate leadership summits, board offsites and CEO panels
• Industry awards, gala dinners and after-dinner business audiences

Audience outcomes

• A conference programme that holds together as one editorial narrative across the day
• Panels that go past the prepared statements and produce something quotable
• A chair who can press a CEO without losing the room or the speaker
• Coverage that lands cleanly with a business-literate audience, on stage and in any subsequent write-up