Panel members

Felix is an economist, fund manager, and development banker whose twenty-five year career in international finance has spanned both the public and private sectors.  He is currently a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.

As a fund manager, he has designed, launched, and managed funds investing in global bond, currency, and credit markets, at publicly-listed asset managers, leading private firms, and his own independent boutique.  Previously, he was an economist at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and General Secretary of the European Stability Initiative think tank in Berlin.  His 2013 book Money: the Unauthorised Biography has been published in fourteen countries and ten languages, and was a Financial Times Economics Book of the Year.

Felix was educated in the UK, Italy, and the US, where he was a Fulbright scholar; and has a D.Phil. in Economics from Oxford.  

Mark is a Professor of Finance and an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of York, where he was previously the Dean of the Management School.  

Mark's research focuses on cost-benefit analysis and the estimation of discount rates.  Much of his work centres on the economic evaluation of long-term projects, policy, and regulations, including measures aimed at protecting biodiversity and mitigating against climate change.  He has provided guidance to a range of international public sector bodies on these matters, including HM Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Office for National Statistics, and the Department for Transport in the UK.  

Mark has held a number of academic positions in the UK, the US, and Australia, while in his early career he was a brewing and distilling equity analyst in the City of London.  
 

Alan is Chief Financial Officer EMEA at Invesco with previous senior leadership roles in banking and insurance. 

He is the Chair of the Investment Association Prudential Regulation Committee and former member of the FCA Markets Practitioner Panel. 

Alan is a chartered accountant and completed the INSEAD Advanced Leadership Programme. He graduated the University of Glasgow with a Bachelor of Accountancy Honours Degree including Economics. 

Ben Ellis is currently the Chief Compliance Officer at Revolut UK. Prior to joining Revolut in 2022, Ben spent most of his career at Lloyds Banking Group, holding a number of senior leadership roles within the Internal Audit function. Ben started his career at BDO where he worked on External and Internal Audits, as well as advisory work for UK financial services firms. Throughout Ben’s career he has developed specialist knowledge in Technology, Payments and Retail Banking. He has had a number of thought leadership pieces published by industry bodies as well as speaking at key industry events. 

Daniel is an expert in policy evaluation, social value analysis and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). His main areas of research focus on the valuation of non-market goods and services, distributional analysis in CBA and the use of wellbeing metrics in policy evaluation and CBA.

 He has 20 years of experience working on CBA in governments and international organisations and has contributed to and co-authored a number of manuals on CBA including the HM Treasury Green Book and the policy evaluation guidelines by the Government of Canada. In 2012 Daniel won the John Hoy Memorial Prize in Economics for his contributions to policy evaluation and CBA in the UK Government.

 Daniel holds a BSc and MSc in Economics and completed his PhD in valuation methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Ed is the Head of Legal and Compliance for the platform and advisory businesses at Fidelity International and is the UK Chief Compliance Officer.
 
Prior to joining Fidelity in 2017, Ed held a range of senior positions in the Financial Services Authority and Financial Conduct Authority. These included running departments setting conduct policy and leading on supervision of the Asset Management sector.
 
After leaving the regulator, Ed worked within Compliance at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London. His early career was as an Economist in the Civil Service.
 
He was educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics.

Frances is the Chief Economist for Santander UK, responsible for the economic analysis and macroeconomic forecasts used by the retail bank.  Her team are responsible for developing: the analysis of economic risk scenarios to support the Prudential Regulatory Authority stress test and IFRS 9 processes; analysis for planning and strategic purposes; supporting the external customer work of the bank including speaking at a variety of events; and writing for external publications. 

Prior to joining she worked for a variety of different institutions as a senior economist including, EY, BT, BBC, Ofcom and OFT. 

She also specialises in Competition and Regulatory economics and has appeared on BBC, Sky, ITV and Bloomberg News, and Radio programmes including the Today and Wake up to Money programmes, providing commentary on published economic data and analysis. 

Peter studied law, accountancy and economics.  He worked in finance in the City of London and then in financial regulation, latterly as Chief Economist of the FCA. 

He is now a Senior Adviser at the economics consultancy Oxera Consulting LLP, providing services to public and private sector clients, mostly on regulatory matters. 

His other recent activities include being a member of the Advisory Panel of the Financial Reporting Council (providing advice on competition issues), an associate at the strategy consultancy Sciteb working on financing of UK science and technology scale-ups, a Panel Member for Finance in the UK's latest Research Excellence Framework assessment, an Associate-in-Practice of the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics and an Affiliate of the Centre for Competition and Regulatory Policy at City, London University. 

He has published a number of thought pieces on Cost-Benefit Analysis.

Sarah is Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. She has been at Bristol since 2005 and was Head of Economics from 2014 – 2021. Sarah is an applied micro-economist whose research focuses on public policy.

Previous positions include at the London School of Economics, the Financial Services Authority, HM Treasury and the Institute for Fiscal Studies.  

Sarah was awarded an OBE in June 2022 for services to economics and education. She is founder and co-chair of Discover Economics, a campaign to increase diversity among economics students. She was Deputy Chair of the REF2021 Economics and Econometrics Sub-Panel and chair of the Royal Economics Society (RES) Women’s Committee. 
 

Stephen is an economist with 30 years of professional experience across the public and private sector. 

He is currently a Member of the Regulatory Policy Committee, Member of the Office for the Internal Market Panel, Chief Economist of the Faraday Institution, Non-Executive Director of the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership and Member of the Ulster University Economic Policy Centre. 

He was previously the Chief Economist at Grant Thornton, the Director of Economics at the CBI and has held various senior economist roles at KPMG, Oxford Economics, Civil Aviation Authority and the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.