Eryk Walczak

Eryk Walczak

Markets | Data Science | Research | Innovation | Digital Finance

About me

I am a Senior Trader at the Bank of England, where I trade FX on behalf of the Bank and the UK Government on the Foreign Exchange and Money Markets desk, and lead the development of the desk’s trade analysis and Transaction Cost Analysis tools.

Before moving to Markets, I spent most of my career at the intersection of data science, research, and financial innovation:

  • Senior Research Data Scientist in the Bank of England’s Advanced Analytics division, consulting across the Bank on machine learning and data science, publishing research, and building data products (2017–2022, 2024–2025).
  • Adviser at the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre (2022–2024). My main project was Project Pyxtrial, a system for the systemic monitoring of stablecoins, which I led from scoping through to delivery. I also scoped Project Keystone (analytics on real-time gross settlement, or RTGS, payments data) and contributed to Project Rosalind (CBDC APIs). Across these, I managed cross-organisational teams of policy specialists, developers, and data scientists.
  • Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, and earlier a Data Scientist at LendInvest.

I hold a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language from University College London.

Research and policy impact

My research applies data science — natural language processing, machine learning, and large-scale experiments — to questions in central banking and finance. It has been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Bank of England Staff Working Paper series, and has been cited by central bank governors including Andrew Bailey, Christine Lagarde, and Mark Carney. One project formed the basis of Sam Woods’ Strong and Simple speech, which led to the reform of UK credit union regulations. See Publications for details.

Open source

I build open-source tools in R, including PostcodesioR (a UK geocoding package on CRAN, peer-reviewed by rOpenSci) and fnirsr (analysis of fNIRS neuroimaging data). More on the Software page.

On the blog you can find my posts on R, Python, data visualisation, and signal processing, going back to 2015 (originally published on walczak.org).