Bonnie Howard
MFSD
Maths, Warwick
Tell us about your career so far.
I studied Maths at the University of Warwick. I started at the Bank around four years ago, in the Monetary and Financial Statistics area. That essentially looks at banking statistics. My first role in that division was looking at the banking sector’s contribution to Gross Domestic Product. So that’s essentially the growth of the UK economy and what the banking sector contributes towards that.
The second role looked at the banking sector’s contribution to the current account, which captures trades between the UK and other countries.
What does Monetary and Financial Statistics do?
The Monetary and Financial Statistics division essentially collects data from all the banks in the UK, and then aggregates all of that data together, and uses it for a number of different reasons. So it publishes a lot of data firstly, but then it also uses the data internally. So an example of that is the Monetary Aggregates that get used by the Monetary Policy Committee. Also a lot of the data gets used in the Financial Stability Review, which is one of the big publications that the Bank does.
A lot of the data is also sent to the Office of National Statistics to contribute the banking sector’s portion of national accounts – which are essentially the accounts of the whole of the United Kingdom.
Part of what I really enjoyed in MFSD was the fact that we got the opportunity to build external relationships. The banks that reported to us had a number of criteria that they had to fulfil when they reported data. So we basically set out definitions of how things had to be reported. And it was really important that the banks understand what we want. So we used to do briefing seminars and it was quite early on in my Bank career – I think it was about six months in – I had to present in the conference centre to all the banks that report to us, on our form, changes on it, and what we expected from the banks. And we were also asking them how we could help them report to us.
We also used to talk to them a lot during the collection of the data. So the data is reported to the Bank quarterly, so every quarter the banks report data to us and we have to understand the movements in it, so we’d try and do that as much as we could by looking at the press and different other kinds of data that you could verify things against. But a lot of the time there were always a few unanswered questions, so you would build up relationships with the banks so you could discuss their data with them to make sure you understood any big movements that fed through to the aggregates.