Helen is Chief Operating Officer for Europe at QuantumBlack, a McKinsey Company. She has guided global organisations on their analytics journeys, advising top executives and leaders on the potential for insight and innovation through advanced analytics. As COO, she is scaling the company and its impact around the world as she helps clients do the same.
Examples of her work include:
- Implementing advanced geospatial analytics to model the impact of consumer changes on the footprint and property portfolio of a retailer, which helped the client understand the drivers of revenue performance, giving a new view of their business
- Leading an advanced analytics approach to bring new techniques to a retail bank, improving performance of its mortgage sales teams; also embedding tools and mindsets of data driven decision making across frontline staff
- Leading a project to predict and reduce government exposure to private sector insolvency, delivering both on-the-ground training and an interactive seminar series to build capabilities of the analytics team
Helen is also the founder of McKinsey’s Analytics Academy and a thought-leader in progressing ethical and sustainable AI standards.
Before joining McKinsey, she was a lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and spent time on secondment at both Tesco and the Bank of England. She also worked at the European Commission, supporting the Directorate-General for External Relations.
Passionate about sailing, Helen is a former world champion and was a training partner to team Great Britain at the 2008 Olympics.
Published work
“Artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom: Prospects and challenges,” McKinsey Global Institute, June 2019
“How to Train Someone to Translate Business Problems into Analytics Questions,” Harvard Business Review, February 2019
“Making data analytics work for you—instead of the other way around,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2016
Past experience
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Associate
European Commission
Stagiaire
Education
Oxford Institute of Legal Practice
LPC, law
Trinity College Cambridge
BA, law