Articles
Essays, field notes, and long-form writing in reverse chronological order.
- (15) Agents Are All You Need: Why the Next Great Hire in Finance Is a One-Person Agent Team
Investment firms that hire a single senior professional who can orchestrate AI agent workflows are acquiring not one person's analytical capacity but a scalable, supervised team of specialist agents. Here is the evidence, the architecture, and the honest limits of the claim.
- (14) Why Small Banks Are Being Left Behind by the SRT Market They Need Most
SRT issuance has crossed 100 cumulative banks and €800 billion in protected loan portfolios. The banks most constrained by capital — standardised-approach institutions carrying the highest risk weights — remain largely outside the market they need most.
- (13) Asset-Backed Finance Is Winning the Margin War in Private Credit
Asset-backed finance is not replacing corporate direct lending. It is capturing a disproportionate share of everything that comes next — and the structural reasons for that are harder to reverse than most commentary suggests.
- (12) Leadership Fails When Nobody Believes the Strategy
Most strategies do not die in PowerPoint. They die when employees, managers, and stakeholders stop believing that leadership’s story is a reliable guide to what the organization will actually do.
- (11) The Warehouse Trap: Why Fintech Lenders That Cannot Graduate to Term Securitisation Are Building Fragility, Not Scale
When a fintech lender announces a £200 million warehouse facility, the headline number is the least important part of the document. The important parts are on pages 40 through 80.
- (10) The Agent Layer Is Becoming the Control Plane of the AI Economy
As model capability improves and inference gets cheaper, the strategic bottleneck shifts upward into the agent layer that governs how intelligence is deployed.
- (9) When Equity Is Out of the Money, Information Becomes the Collateral
When equity is out of the money, control over borrower information can become more valuable than the collateral itself because distress changes incentives first.
- (8) Double Pledging and the Case for Collateral Registries
Double pledging is a governance problem before it is a technology problem, and collateral registries help only if legal design and operating controls are credible.
- (7) Succession Risk Is the Most Underpriced Risk in Corporate Governance
Succession failures reprice companies abruptly because boards usually underinvest in readiness, emergency planning, and the leadership depth needed to preserve stability.
- (6) When Diversification Destroys Focus: Why Scope Demands Exceptional Governance
Diversification creates value only when governance and capital discipline can absorb complexity; otherwise, scope erodes focus, returns, and investor confidence.
- (5) Return to Office Is Not About Productivity, It’s About Control
Return-to-office mandates are better understood as governance decisions about control, bargaining power, and capital exposure than as evidence-based productivity policy.
- (4) Consumer Duty and the Capital Markets: Why Fair Value Is a Funding Discipline, Not a Compliance Exercise
Consumer Duty is reshaping funding for non-bank lenders by turning fair value, outcomes monitoring, and conduct governance into signals capital providers can price.
- (3) Why Boards Overweight Strategy and Underweight Execution Risk
Boards are built to debate strategy, but most serious value destruction comes from execution failures in controls, systems, vendors, and operational oversight.
- (2) The Myth of Cost of Capital in Venture-Backed Companies
Equity feels free only because its cost is delayed; once founders model dilution, return expectations, and burn, fundraising looks like capital allocation.
- (1) Europe's AI Sovereignty Debate Is Really About Capital Allocation
Europe's AI sovereignty debate is really about financial capacity: whether Europe can turn domestic savings into the capital needed to fund frontier AI at scale.