Karen is a Principal Analyst in Celent's North American insurance practice. She brings a broad range of insurance and consulting experience to her work; she has worked as a management consultant to and within insurance carriers and other financial services companies for over 25 years.

Karen’s focus is life insurance technology and trends. Her research concentrates on life, all aspects of life insurance processing including illustrations, eApplications and eSignature, new business and underwriting systems, policy administration systems, claims systems, and digital enablement technologies. Her consulting experience at Celent include new business and underwriting system selections, policy administration system selections, distribution management system selections, vendor product strategy reviews, a life claims system benchmarking project, eApplication and automated underwriting cost analyses, plus several small life insurance technology analyses. Karen led Celent’s Knowledge Management team for seven years. The KMC supports Celent's vendor assessments across all practices and helps manage vendor data on Celent's online platform, VendorMatch. She helped build out Celent's VendorMatch Digital Services Platform.

Karen’s research has been featured in Insurance & Technology, Insurance Networking News, ITA/Pro and Technology Decisions.

Karen began her career as a Financial Management Program Trainee for General Electric. Her past experience includes Coopers & Lybrand’s Financial Services management consulting group, John Hancock’s internal consulting division, and TowerGroup’s Consulting Services Group. Prior to joining Celent, Ms Monks was a financial analyst for a small Richmond, VA financial valuation firm.

Karen is based in Richmond, VA and enjoys her early morning walks, reading, gardening, cooking, and time with her family and friends. She especially loves traveling with her husband.