Marina joined the IRB in July 2026 as a lay member, bringing more than 25 years’ experience of working in regulation, strategy and transformation across the communications, technology, professional services and charity sectors. Following over a decade’s career in strategy consulting, she joined Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, where she led large-scale, high-impact consumer protection and competition policy programmes.
The IRB oversees ICAEW’s regulatory and disciplinary work, ensuring it’s carried out in the public interest and supports trust in the profession. Its role includes ensuring that the Professional Standards Department discharges its duties effectively, and that the regulatory and disciplinary committees carry out their functions efficiently and fairly.
“I’m delighted to be part of the IRB,” says Marina. “I’m looking forward to helping make sure we achieve the right outcomes; that we’re always on the side of the consumer, but that we strike the correct balance between protecting the public interest and listening to the profession.
To me, regulation is all about incentivising the right behaviours and outcomes. And it’s about using the resources you have to maximise the impact and encourage those outcomes.
“It's also about convincing the profession to do the right thing,” she adds. “It’s not just about following the letter of regulation; it’s much broader than that and involves using the whole panoply of levers – including convening powers and shining a light on what works well and what can lead to poor outcomes”.
Improving outcomes for consumers and citizens
“My earlier career was in strategy consulting,” says Marina. “For over 10 years, I was advising telecoms and technology firms, financial investors and policymakers around the world, primarily in the UK, Europe and South America, on telecoms, internet and online issues.”
She later joined Ofcom as competition policy director. “I was leading projects seeking to incentivise competition and investment in the broadband market through proportionate wholesale regulation of the dominant provider, namely BT, to allow others to compete on a more equal footing” she says. “This also included imposing appropriate regulatory reporting obligations on BT to provide transparency of its non-discrimination and pricing obligations which meant I was working closely with in-house accountants.”
Subsequently, she led Ofcom's work on the regulation of Royal Mail, looking at the financial sustainability of the universal postal service and options for reform. More recently, Marina led Ofcom’s policy work on reducing consumer harm from telecoms enabled fraud and scams. This programme of work involved not only imposing enforceable obligations on providers but also encouraging industry to take steps to mitigate the risk of harm through voluntary commitments.
In 2014, she took on her first non-executive role, becoming a lay member of the Legal Services Board (LSB) where she completed two terms, ending in 2021. “There are a lot of parallels between that role and my IRB role,” she says, “and I think bringing an oversight regulator’s lens to the board will be useful.”
More recently, Marina served on the board of gambling prevention and treatment charity GambleAware during a period of significant organisational and regulatory change. As well as being a member of the charity’s Audit and Risk Committee and Performance and Delivery Committee, she also became Chair of the Resources Committee.
“One of the initiatives I contributed to was setting up a lived-experience council of former addicts and those affected by addiction, embedding it into a governance structure so that they had a say in strategic decisions,” she explains. “We took good advice from them on all kinds of issues, including destigmatising communications campaigns to achieve maximum engagement.”
Helping the IRB stay agile, adaptable and resilient
"A key challenge for the IRB as a regulator is keeping abreast of change, so we need to stay agile, adaptable and resilient," she emphasises. "We also need to exercise strategic foresight to ensure we’re ahead of what's going on, rather than simply reacting to market, geo-political and technological developments.”
She hopes her regulatory expertise, consumer protection background and private sector consulting experience will contribute to helping the IRB meet these challenges.
“I’m bringing my understanding and experience of a range of different types of regulation,” she says. “It’s not about regulation for regulation's sake; it’s about better regulation principles – regulating where absolutely necessary and in the least intrusive way possible.”
Her work on fraud, where she had to persuade companies to do the right thing, allied with her private sector experience in consulting, means she brings a real-world perspective to the regulatory sphere.
“I don’t have that ivory tower viewpoint,” she stresses. “Ultimately, it’s about protecting the public interest, but you also need to understand the perspective of people who make up the industry – the firms and the professionals.
“In my consulting career, a number of my colleagues were ex-accountants, and at Ofcom, I worked closely with accountants on regulatory financial reporting,” she adds. “So, I have huge respect for the profession; I even contemplated becoming an accountant at one point.”
What do you hope to achieve as an IRB member?
“Overall, I’m looking forward to contributing to proportionate, forward-looking regulation,” she says, “and supporting a culture of continuous learning that helps ensure the profession remains trusted, relevant and resilient in the face of new challenges.
“I'm a great believer in data and metrics, and in regulators using data transparency, benchmarking, and wider market data to drive the right behaviours, share best practice, and show where things can go wrong,” she explains. “To me, a big win would be to help support ICAEW as a regulator to become increasingly transparent and data-driven.”
She is also interested in the effect of AI on the regulator and the profession, particularly what it might mean for entry level accountants. “The nature of the job and market is changing really quickly,” she stresses. “I don't necessarily believe it's closing off jobs, but rather it opens up a lot of opportunities to make the job more interesting.”
Another area she wants to highlight is equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). “We need the profession to be diverse, but we also need to ensure that ICAEW as a regulator embraces diversity,” she says. “Because you can't be saying accountants must embrace EDI if you’re not demonstrating that yourself.”
From a personal perspective, she’s excited to be working in a new sector. “I’ve always enjoyed variety,” she explains. “That's why I went into strategy consulting, because it meant working with different clients, different geographies and on different issues.
“I also enjoy learning,” she adds. “And this is a new organisation in a different sector for me to learn about. So, I’m looking forward to getting to know people around the table, getting to know the executive, finding out more about the issues and challenges we face, and helping to find solutions.”
