Juliet Uluma Onyeka

Juliet Uluma Onyeka is a PhD Researcher at the School of Finance and Management at SOAS University of London. She has a BA Hons in Accounting and Financial Management from the University of Essex and an MSc In Information Technology & Management with SAP from Sheffield Hallam University. 

Her SAP qualification has taken her to work on a number of Global SAP projects including working in Switzerland as an SAP consultant implementing high-profile global SAP project. She is also a member of SOAS Centre for Global Finance (CGF). More recently, Juliet has spent over a decade as a financial services regulator specialising in firms compliance with MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive). 

Her regulatory experience includes working with firms to ensure markets work well by firms adherence to MiFID rules. She has worked to drive change in organisations that were implementing MiFID II to ensure the regulator is able to detect suspected instances of Market Abuse. She has been involved in overseeing complex high-profile regulatory issues by applying stakeholder management techniques and sound judgement. Her no-nonsense approach to regulatory issues earned her a nomination for the ‘most-helpful regulator at the London Compliance Awards and she has been involved in some high profile outcomes for the regulator. She has built a solid and respected reputation for herself amongst compliance professionals in the financial services industry. 

Juliet is an advocate for diversity and inclusion issues. It with this passion for financial regulatory issues and diversity & inclusion that her research project seeks to explore within the context of COVID-19, whether ethnic minorities are inherently vulnerable leading them to be more susceptible to investment fraud within their own communities. As a regulator, a key strategic objective for financial services regulation is consumer protection and Juliet, (from an philosophical standpoint) positions herself as an interpretivist. She is interested in the meaning that people bring to situations. People are different, have different cultures , background and experience. It is through this lens that she will address the questions arising from her research project.

My research interests stem from a desire to protect consumers in disadvantaged communities. A vast array of literature exists on financial regulation; its effectiveness during the global financial crisis; financial law and financial crime. 

However, in 2020 the world was struck by a health pandemic, namely; Covid-19, and during this time there was a noticeable increase in financial crime specifically fraud and scams in part due to the world’s seismic shift to the reliance on technology. In 2020, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK financial services regulator also observed both an increase in fraud and a change in investment habits due to the reliance on technology and financial innovation.