JOAN UK

JOAN is a newly founded, specialist consultancy that helps FCA-regulated firms navigate the shift toward AI-generated search in financial services. As the industry moves beyond traditional search engines, we help firms to understand how they are discovered within AI models, with a specific focus on visibility and representation accuracy.

As AI becomes the front door to financial decision-making, our ambition is simple: to make sure that when someone asks who to trust with their money, your firm is the answer, not an afterthought. Based in Edinburgh, we are building JOAN to become the definitive visibility partner for FS institutions across the UK and beyond.

Why we exist: Most organisations understand digital acquisition. A smaller number understand rigorous behavioural measurement. Very few connect the two to help a leadership team make commercial decisions about AI-driven discovery. That combination is what we are built around. One discipline understands how AI systems interpret and represent an organisation. The other understands how to measure behaviour and exposure with enough rigour for a board to act on and turn a vague concern about AI visibility into a structured, evidence-based view of commercial risk.

Our approach: Our work is anchored in a defined framework, the Discovery Standard which makes our thinking repeatable, measurable and independent of any one person which a growing team can apply consistently.

What we offer: Our primary offering is an independent diagnostic assessment, delivered as a board-ready report. It gives leadership teams a clear view of how their firm is discovered and represented within AI models, where visibility or accuracy falls short, and what that means commercially, so decisions can be made on evidence rather than assumption.

Our purpose: Financial services is entering a period where trust, and the ability to be found, will increasingly be decided by AI. JOAN exists so that regulated firms are ready for that shift.

JOAN began with a simple observation – the way people find and choose financial services is changing faster than the organisations serving them can respond.

Anurag spent close to two decades in digital search, the last ten embedded in financial services. Inside a major UK bank, he built search and discovery functions from the ground up where none existed before. As AI systems began to change how customers research products and decide who to trust, he pioneered an early organisational approach to Generative Engine Optimisation translating a fast-moving and disruptive shift into something leadership teams could understand

Joseph came to the same problem from the other direction. His career has been spent quantifying digital behaviour across financial services, e-com and the public sector, from large-scale public sector programmes to rebuilding the measurement function at one of the UK’s largest financial institutions. He knows how to turn behaviour into evidence into decisions.

Understanding how AI systems interpret and represent an organisation is one discipline is the gap they saw. Measuring exposure with great accuracy so a board to act on is another.

So they built JOAN around that combination. Anurag leads AI Discovery Strategy, focusing on how organisations remain recognised, represented and included as discovery moves from search engines to AI systems. Joseph leads measurement & analytics, helping organisations quantify exposure, identify blind spots and track improvement without any guesswork.

Together, they created the Discovery Standard, a defined framework that makes JOAN’s work repeatable, measurable and independent of any one person. It is the foundation for everything we do. We started JOAN because regulated firms deserve more than opinion. They deserve a partner who has worked inside their world, and who can show them, with evidence, how they are being discovered and what to do about it.

Anurag Ahluwalia

Director & Cofounder

Joseph Onibokun

Director & Cofounder