About me
Present...
I am currently the Director of Financial Inclusion and the Consumer Protection Research Initiative at Innovations for Poverty Action. In our work, we seek to increase adoption and usage of well designed, responsible digital financial service products that help consumers and small businesses achieve their needs with limited exposure to consumer protection risks. We do this by collaborating with financial service providers, regulators and civil society to deploy new methods of data analysis and rigorous testing of solutions. The Financial Inclusion Program at Innovations for Poverty Action has funded more than 130 randomised evaluations in 29 different countries over the last 20 years. The Consumer Protection Research Initiative has so far funded over 20 studies and we're hoping to expand that even further. Get in touch with me if you want to know more.
I continue to interact with and contribute to the academic community. I am a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics Department for Psychology and Behavioural Science. My work has been published in top finance, economics and marketing journals, presented at Harvard, MIT, Chicago Booth and LSE, and featured in The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The Chicago Booth Review. I have an extensive network of academics I work with, and enjoy crafting win-win opportunities to work with academics in applied settings. Doing so helps to keep my knowledge fresh and gives my partners new perspectives on their challenges.
Past...
I originally trained as an economist, first gaining my Economics (BSc) and then Development Economics (MSc) at Manchester University. Economics offered a framework and a set of theories which helped make sense of the world, from individual decision making right up to international affairs. I used my economics training to work in a number of public policy roles for the UK and US governments.
I started my behavioural science journey in 2012 when I joined the UK's financial regulator (the FCA) and ran it's first randomised controlled trial. Behavioural economics offered a new lens which complemented my existing analytical toolkit. Behavioural economics is not an alternative to economics, but rather a complement - economics always has been and always will be about behaviour.
At the FCA, I co-founded, built and led the Behavioural Economics and Data Science team. We were the first dedicated behavioural economics team within a regulator. We had a big ambition and a broad objective to use behavioural science and data science (and later design) to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the regulator and its regulations.
In 2019 I moved to the Netherlands, and started work at the Dutch financial regulator, the Authority for Financial Markets as a Senior Behavioural Economist. I helped them develop their social science research strategy and created their research publication series - AFM Occasional Papers. At the same time as moving to the Netherlands, I started consulting on the side.
I took that company full time in Summer 2021. I partnered with companies, social enterprises and governments all over the world, to design products, services and policies which take account of real human behaviour. I worked on topics including Buy Now Pay Later; Cryptocurrencies; FCA Consumer Duty implementation; educational achievement during COVID; increasing tax morale in low and middle income countries with the World Bank eMBeD team; compliance behaviour of firms; and a range of topics including fraud, consent, Cash-in, Cash Out and life insurance in India. It was a fantastic experience!