Private Counsel
For decisions that do not fit a conventional advisory engagement.
Some decisions are too consequential for a consultant’s framework.
They sit where technology meets finance, or where a commercial plan runs into a regulator’s view of it, and they rarely arrive labelled. A change of payments partner, or a cheaper cloud contract, can look operational for months before anyone realises it has settled something much larger. Others are plainer and harder: whether you should do something you clearly can.
I work on decisions like these for a small number of founders and principals: people who own what they are deciding about, and who will live with the outcome long after any adviser has gone home.
The value is judgment
Counsel is a slightly old-fashioned word, and I’ve kept it on purpose. It means advice from someone with no stake in which way you go. I have no implementation team to keep busy and no technology or financial products to sell, so there is nothing I am quietly steering you towards.
You get an outside view of a situation that everyone inside has, for perfectly good reasons, stopped seeing clearly. Assumptions harden. Politics settles around them, and seniority makes it worse, because fewer people are willing to contradict you. So we start with what is happening, which is not always what the numbers say or what reaches the top, and then look past the first move to the reactions it sets off. The ones inside your own organisation get missed most.
If an idea is weak, I’ll tell you. Usually earlier than is comfortable.
Where technology, finance and power collide
The hardest decisions belong to more than one discipline, which in practice means nobody owns them until something goes wrong.
Open banking began in the UK as a competition remedy. From 2018 the Competition and Markets Authority required the nine largest current-account providers to let customers share their data securely with authorised third parties; the aim was more competition in retail banking. Its larger legacy is turning out to be in payments — who controls the moment a customer pays, and who collects the data and the fee that come with it. AI is doing something similar to lending. A decision that once needed an underwriter can now be made by a model in seconds, and the question that follows is which senior manager answers for it.
My own career has moved across most of these boundaries: technology and financial systems, regulation, transformation, and investigation, which leaves you permanently suspicious of tidy explanations. Mostly that’s useful. When something unfamiliar turns up, the first question to ask is rarely “What is this?” It’s “Where have we seen this before, and what happened next?”
The conversations worth having
Most people get in touch at one of a few moments.
Before a decision that cannot easily be reversed, such as an acquisition or a core-banking migration that would take years to unwind. The best time to talk is while it is still private.
When the business is moving into financial or technical territory it does not know well, and needs someone who understands the mechanics as well as the commercial reality.
After a regulatory change, or a Dear CEO letter from the FCA that seems to describe your business a little too precisely. The work is mostly in the second-round effects.
Occasionally the problem is volume: so much information that nobody can say which part of it matters.
What the relationship looks like
- The shape depends on the situation. Some relationships amount to a single conversation about one decision — whether to seek your own e-money licence, say, after a few years of operating under someone else’s. Others run for months, with me available as a sounding board while things move.
- I don’t do consulting theatre. Nobody needs a programme of work built around their problem just because that is how professional services are usually sold. There may be no deck at the end, and no formal report. Often the most valuable outcome is a better question than the one we started with; occasionally it is a decision not to act, which is harder to sell to a board than it should be.
- What is discussed stays confidential. People need to be able to say the difficult thing plainly, sometimes out loud for the first time.
A deliberately small practice
I only take on a few clients at a time. The work needs attention and context, neither of which survives a high-volume advisory business, so not every enquiry becomes an engagement.
Fit matters on both sides. When we first speak, I will be trying to work out whether an independent mind alongside you would improve the decisions you are making. If it wouldn’t, you’re better off hearing that at the start than six months in.
If that sounds like the right conversation
You don’t need to prepare a brief or put the problem into consulting language. Describe the situation as it is, mess included: what you are trying to decide, and why it is proving hard. What is at stake usually becomes clear quickly enough. If there is a fit, we can work out the form of the relationship from there.