Commentary, analysis, and perspective drawn from 25 years operating across regulated financial services, fintech, and alternative investments.
Your firm is accountable for what its vendors do, more of what they do runs on AI, and nobody at the board table can see inside it. What regulators expect of the firm that buys, what the Salesloft Drift breach and a US bank’s 8-K filing say about where the risk actually sits, and NIST’s four functions pointed outward at the vendor estate.
Your buyer is not just buying software. They are spending their own credibility on you, and the weights are not inspectable, the training data is not theirs, and the behaviour they tested at onboarding shifts with every release. What replaces inspection, why the first screen is now an agent reading your public record, and what the vendors who keep winning put on the table alongside the demo.
A subject matter expert with a language model and a connection to your data can now build the CRM, the breach register or the risk dashboard you used to rent. Software that was only ever a workflow is dying and the data layer underneath is becoming the asset. Five marks for scoring a vendor list, which vendors you will pay more for rather than less, and what the CTO's job becomes when every department can build.
Software vendors are putting agents into products that act on their own, and most clients still file it as a software upgrade. A named executive is accountable for it all the same. What the first failures looked like, where the EU insists on a human, and what the person who signs will ask you once they notice.
Two years of stands, sponsored roundtables and content, and no deal anyone can trace to it. Marketing in regulated financial services now runs on what others say about you: clients, partners, the industry, and the AI systems building your buyer's shortlist.
One built a system. One built a brand. Clearwater Analytics and Fast show what durable go-to-market actually requires: qualification, staged pipeline discipline, and expansion earned through attention rather than assumed at renewal.
Every founder in financial services eventually faces the same decision: commit capital, credibility and the next eighteen months to an idea, or walk away. Making that call with evidence rather than conviction, plus the question the book could not yet ask: what stops an LLM rebuilding your product by Friday?
The ten-year lock-up was an operational shock absorber. Semi-liquid structures remove it. Where AI carries the load across onboarding, origination, valuation, liquidity and third-party oversight, and the three places governance has to hold the line.
The high-risk deadlines moved to December 2027. The transparency obligations, the AI literacy duty, and UK senior manager accountability did not. What actually moved, where your systems sit, and what both sides of the table should do with the window.
BlackRock runs $25 trillion through Aladdin. Man Group's staff use generative AI daily. Morgan Stanley reports 98% adoption. But most firms have not built the infrastructure to make AI useful. The gap is widening.
Declan Sheehy joins Iain Carey on The Fund AI Pod. Covers AI hype versus reality in fund management, why siloed data is blocking the industry, the ESG and energy paradox, how boards should govern AI accountability, and why partnering beats building from scratch.
Google used enough cooling water in 2023 to supply London for nine days. Microsoft's datacentres consume as much electricity as Denmark. The infrastructure cost of AI is real, growing, and largely unaccounted for.
The institutions that will lead financial services in the next decade are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones that have learned to move from asking what happened to knowing what is about to happen. Adapted from Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services.
Jonny Fry and James Tylee go deeper on why the economic case for reskilling is more compelling than the talent case, why running T+5 and T+0 settlement simultaneously is harder than most boards have registered, and why fear of AI is overrated. Published by Coinmonks (140,000+ followers) and 2Tokens.
The WEF expects 170 million new roles by 2030 while 92 million are displaced. The Financial Services Skills Commission puts the AI skills gap at 35 percentage points. When AI moves from answering questions to executing decisions, the human checkpoint becomes more demanding, not less.
Declan Sheehy joins Ken Coyne on Tech People to discuss what it actually takes to innovate in financial services over the next decade. Covers the commercial test, how HSBC scaled to $31.6bn with a spotless regulatory record, and why AI, tokenisation, and Web3 are a single architectural challenge, not separate bets.
Declan Sheehy joins George Ralph CITP, Nada Baker, Lily Videnova, and Kate Coe Temnomeroff with host Stuart MacDonald for a special radio edition covering AI, cyber, technology, and the human responsibility that sits underneath all of it.
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.
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 those signals 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 ends up with the wrong outcome.
The vendor sitting across from you has a structured negotiation playbook. Most buyers in financial services do not know it exists. Having operated on both sides of the table, this article explains what the vendor is doing and how to respond.
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.
Declan Sheehy joins Daniel Page, Jerome Lussan, Paul H., and Paul Thomas Walsh with host Dr. Stu to cover alternative investments, crypto, AI, RegTech, CleanTech, and the recurring human tendency to mistake a bubble for a paradigm shift.
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.
Every new technology a financial services firm adopts expands its attack surface. AI, blockchain, IoT, and digital currencies introduce risks for which no established controls or regulatory guidance exist.
Reputation has two dimensions. Capability perception changes slowly. Character perception can be destroyed overnight. The IRA Financial Trust and Gemini case study shows which one matters more.
The shift from prevention thinking to resilience thinking is the most important strategic change a financial services board can make. It changes what you invest in, what you measure, and how you respond.
Claude recommended rock climbing in the Cotswolds. There are no mountains in the Cotswolds. In wealth management, the same confident delivery of the wrong answer has consequences that are financial, regulatory, and reputational.
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.
The pager served a narrow purpose and stagnated. The mobile phone became a general-purpose platform. AI in wealth management faces the same test. The trajectory is promising, but the trust question remains open.
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.
Most investors focus on headline returns. The experienced ones focus on the terms. Fee structures, conflicts of interest, and governance provisions determine whether alignment is real or theatrical.
Blackstone bought Hilton for $26 billion in 2007. Eleven years later it produced the biggest capital gain in private equity history. The value was created by operational transformation, not financial engineering.
An early appearance on the Naked Short Club on Resonance FM covering hedge funds, alternative investments, and the forces shaping global markets. Hosted by Dr. Stu, with psychedelic sounds and poetry.
The gap between stated organisational values and the decisions that actually get made under pressure is one of the most reliable indicators of cultural health. Most firms have the values wall. Fewer have built the conditions that make those values operationally real.
Regulated firms are designed to control outcomes. Innovation requires tolerating uncertainty. The question is what kind of leadership reconciles those two realities.
Gandhi's watch sold for $1.8 million. The watch was worth $50. The rest was provenance. Blockchain offers a way to make that verifiable, immutable, and tradeable at scale.
The custody chain in hedge fund administration is built on fragmented reconciliation between parties who do not trust each other. Blockchain offers a single shared ledger. The barriers are not technical.