After a 25-year career in the global private equity industry, Stephen Peel has recently founded SMP Policy Innovation Limited, a non-for-profit organisation aiming to promote, design and assist advanced government policy.

From 1997 to 2014, Stephen was a managing partner at TPG Capital, one of the world’s largest global private investment firms. He was one of the early partners of TPG and part of the leadership team that grew the firm from some $3 billion of assets under management to over $60 billion. He founded TPG's European office and headed the European operations from 1997 to 2008 before moving to Hong Kong to head the Asian business. Prior to TPG Capital, Stephen was in the Principal Investment Area of Goldman Sachs from 1989 to 1997. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford where he focusses on low-income country industrialisation.

Stephen serves on the board of the Russian-based retailer Lenta Limited, the board of the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, and is a member of the Trilateral Commission and of the Global Partners Council of the Institute of New Economic Thinking. He is on the advisory board for Washington-based NGOs Institute of State Effectiveness and the Open Contracting Partnership, and is on the Board of the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs at Yale University.

He received his MA from Cambridge University in 1987, represented Great Britain in the Olympic Games in 1988 and received a Master of Advanced Studies from the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs at Yale University in 2015.