Commentary, analysis, and perspective drawn from 25 years operating across regulated financial services, fintech, and alternative investments.
Most conversations about innovation in financial services begin in the wrong place. They start with the technology and work backwards, hoping the business case reveals itself. After 25 years at C-suite level across regulated financial services, that approach fails more often than it succeeds. Not because the technology is wrong, but because the thinking behind it is incomplete.
The FCA issued £176 million in fines in 2024 and a further £124 million in 2025. Nationwide, Barclays, Monzo, Starling, Citigroup. The pattern across every case is the same: compliance infrastructure that failed to keep pace with the business around it.
Before a serious B2B vendor invests meaningful time in your process, they have already scored your opportunity against a structured qualification framework. Understanding the signals that drive that judgment tells you something important about how your organisation presents itself commercially.
Enterprise procurement is designed to reduce risk and control cost. But the process it runs to achieve those goals often compresses genuine differentiation into a feature checklist, and the firm buying the technology ends up with the wrong outcome.
The vendor sitting across from you has a playbook drawn from FBI negotiation techniques. Most buyers in financial services do not know it exists. Having built institutional vendor management at HSBC as the buyer, then operated as the vendor at Backstop, ONYX, and in RegTech, this article explains exactly what they are doing and how to respond.
Revenue growth rate, pipeline value, churn, CAC versus LTV, win rate. Non-commercial C-suite leaders do not need to own these numbers but they need to understand them well enough to ask the right questions when the narrative being presented does not hold together.
Generative AI reached 100 million users faster than any consumer technology before it. The governance frameworks needed to manage it responsibly have not kept pace. This article examines where AI actually stands in financial services, what the ethical obligations mean in practice, and why the gap between capability and accountability is the industry's most pressing problem.
When a regulator takes action and a BBC headline follows within hours, the reputational, operational, and financial consequences compound quickly. Trust in financial services is asymmetric: years to build, days to lose.
Wise's shift to a US primary listing continues a pattern that should concern anyone who cares about the UK's long-term position in global capital markets. The causes are structural, not incidental.
The House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee's report is a clear-eyed assessment of a problem the industry has known about for years. The question is whether the institutions named have the appetite for real cultural change.
The financial institutions that will lead in generative AI are not those moving fastest. They are those building the most trustworthy systems. Ethics embedded from day one is a commercial differentiator, not a regulatory burden.
AI is not eliminating the need for talent in financial services. It is changing what talent needs to look like. The firms investing in people development now will have a structural advantage over those waiting for the labour market to supply what they need.
Robinhood's transformation from retail trading app to AI-powered wealth and banking platform signals how the expectations of the next generation of wealth holders will reshape financial services well before the Great Wealth Transfer completes.
As $84 trillion moves to digitally native generations by 2045, Investment-as-a-Service will be the hidden engine powering access, personalisation, and scalability across wealth management. The distribution model is already being rebuilt.
The government's ambition is real. A 20-times increase in sovereign compute, AI growth zones, and a National Data Library. Whether financial services benefits depends almost entirely on execution, and UK technology programme delivery has a difficult track record.
JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bridgewater are integrating AI into core decision-making at scale. For alternative investment managers, the implications run across due diligence, risk modelling, tokenisation, and operational architecture.
The World Economic Forum's analysis confirms what experienced operators know: the banks performing best in the AI era are those who have invested most seriously in the people operating alongside the technology, not in the technology alone.
Getting your first institutional clients is one challenge. Building the infrastructure that lets you serve them well at scale is a different one entirely. The habits that produce early traction often become liabilities if they are not evolved at pace.
From operational efficiency and bespoke personalisation to predictive insight and infrastructure readiness, the wealth management AI conversation has moved from aspiration to execution. The question for C-suite leaders is how to invest well, not whether to invest.
A conversation drawing on COO and CTO experience across HSBC, ONYX Capital Group, and Kavi Holding AG on the most consequential technology decision any financial services firm makes, and the framework for getting it right.
AI adoption in wealth management is accelerating, but the firms getting the most from it are not the ones moving fastest. They are the ones being most deliberate, mapping implementation to specific problems before deploying the technology.
Over $1.7 trillion wiped from the largest AI-exposed stocks in two weeks. The market is not losing faith in AI. It is raising the evidence threshold for that faith, and that is probably the right response at this stage of the cycle.
Non-technical executives in financial services cannot treat tech spend as someone else's problem. The right metrics, structured reviews, and external benchmarking are not optional in an era where technology underpins every revenue and risk function.
State Street's exploration of blockchain for custody and fund administration raises the question most institutions eventually face. Using the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Framework against a real custody use case, the answer is more straightforward than the technology hype suggests.
Purpose is one of those words that has been used so often it has started to lose meaning. That is a problem, because when purpose is genuinely defined and genuinely lived, it changes how an organisation behaves in ways that financial incentives alone cannot replicate.
Getting vendor selection right in a regulated environment matters beyond immediate commercial benefit. A vendor who fails creates your failure in the eyes of the FCA. The framework that prevents that starts before a single document is issued.