Karen Croxson Email Address

Analytics Engagement Manager

Financial Conduct Authority is a financial services company which provides Consumer protection, Market confidence and Financial stability.

Integrating social science and AI is a key enabler for evidence-based regulation. I founded and lead a new economic and social data science function at the FCA to capture this opportunity. My teams combine economics, data science and behavioural science to uncover how markets work, diagnose consumer harm and risks to competition, market functioning, and financial stability. We also design and test policy, and estimate the impact of our interventions (“what works”). We are assessing the opportunities and harms from technology and big data in financial services and shaping the FCA's regulatory approach to digital markets, including developing scientific methodologies to detect digital harms from eg algorithmic bias or online choice architecture. I led our recently published joint work with the Bank of England on AI and oversee our work with the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum on algorithms. If you are excited by this intersection and the idea of working with incredible datasets on challenging questions, we’d love to hear from you. We also regularly collaborate with academics. Take a look at some of our published research and interests (https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/corporate/fca-research-agenda.pdf) and get in touch to discuss ideas. Before joining the FCA, I worked as a management consultant at QuantumBlack (AI by McKinsey). My teams helped C-level clients solve complex problems using advanced analytics and AI. I led cross-disciplinary teams of PhD scientists, consultants, and industry experts to structure problems at pace, develop hypotheses, wrangle large scale novel datasets, implement algorithms, and translate results into action. Some of our work developed people analytics to empower employees and transform performance. Before specialising in data science I worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey, based in London and Washington D.C., and serving clients across many functions, industries, and regions. In my earlier career, I was an academic research fellow at Oxford and a lecturer in applied microeconomics. My research has been published in leading journals and covered by the media. I continue to serve as an advisory board member for Oxford’s Social Data Science Masters and PhD programmes, a Guest Lecturer, and an Honorary Professor in Economics at Nottingham. Finally, I’m proud to be a NED at FinRegLab and sit on advisory boards for a few other excellent ‘AI for good’ initiatives. I often speak at events on AI, policy, and the economy. Do get in touch if you’re working on a related initiative and it could be helpful to connect.