Aarez Ali
Memon.
I am |
Hi, I'm Aarez, a Pakistani who studied Economics at the University of Leeds. I am a curious and driven person with a passion for using my skills to solve real-world problems, from forecasting expenditure to behavioural interventions at scale. I've worked across public policy, consulting, and entrepreneurship, and I'm currently a CFA Level I candidate working toward a career at the intersection of economics, finance, and technology.
This site is where I document my work, projects, and thinking — from econometric models and strategy to the ideas I'm exploring through Indus Labs.
Where I've worked.
Founder
Indus Labs is an independent research and production studio exploring the intersection of economics, data, and technology — building tools, models, and ideas that leave the world better than we found it.
- Developing DictionaryX, an Android app being built and alpha-tested, alongside exploratory projects.
Consultant
Pro-bono consulting engagement for a local technology client, solving complex business problems across strategy, operations, and commercial growth.
- Developed a competitor benchmarking framework across five rivals, producing a differentiation strategy covering branding, audience engagement, and sponsorship visibility — recommendations were adopted by the client within weeks of delivery.
- Built a multi-scenario financial model in Stata and R to evaluate strategic options, identifying initiatives projected to grow annual revenue by 2% within 9 months; applied HuggingFace LLMs in Python to run sentiment analysis on social media data, converting qualitative signals into quantitative strategic inputs.
Economist
The Government Economic Service is the UK government's in-house community of professional economists, placing economists across Whitehall departments to inform policy through rigorous analysis. At the DWP — the UK's largest public spending department — I worked on forecasting and behavioural policy affecting millions of benefit claimants.
- Developed capital allocation forecasting models in SAS and Excel across 350 Local Authorities, reducing forecast error by 15% through sensitivity analysis and auditability controls, directly informing £200bn in annual expenditure affecting 24 million claimants.
- Built a behavioural nudge intervention that accelerated Universal Credit rollout across four Local Authorities, contributing to a managed migration programme targeting 800,000+ ESA claimants; also re-engineered Excel workflows cutting processing time by 20%.
Things I've built.
Econometrics Model
A quantitative model built as part of my independent research work.
Available on Request
Coming Soon!
Indus Lab's second app is in development. Announcement soon.