Finance & fintech expertise
Security, DevOps, and AI governance leadership for fintech platforms, banks, and regulated financial services.
Pillars
Fintech & banking platforms
Security and DevOps for platforms serving 1,500+ financial institutions — built for regulators, not just users.
Regulatory frameworks
PCI DSS, SOX, GLBA, NYDFS 500, FFIEC, CCPA, GDPR — and the operating cadence that keeps them current, not crammed.
Working with regulators
Hands-on experience walking examiners and auditors through controls, exceptions, and remediation plans.
Revenue-aligned security
Reframing security as a deal accelerator — faster questionnaires, cleaner attestations, shorter procurement cycles.
AI governance for financial services
Model risk, bias, explainability, and the audit artifacts your regulator actually asks for.
Third-party risk at scale
Vendor tiering, continuous monitoring, and the controls that survive a 500-vendor portfolio.
Frameworks & regulations
- PCI DSS
- SOX ITGC
- SOC 2 Type II
- CSA STAR Level II
- NIST CSF
- ISO 27001
- GLBA
- NYDFS Part 500
- FFIEC CAT
- CFPB guidance
- Reg E / Reg Z context
- CCPA / CPRA
- GDPR
- GLBA Safeguards Rule
- NIST AI RMF
- SR 11-7 patterns
- EU AI Act readiness
Related writing
All fintech postsSecurity Culture Is a Control. Audit It.
Security culture is usually a poster — no objective, no defined behavior, no evidence, no failure mode. Give it those four and it audits like any firewall.
Stop Charging the SSO Tax
SSO and audit logs are the controls a buyer needs to trust you — conversion features, not enterprise upsells. Paywall them and you tax your own funnel.
Cyber-Insurance Renewal Is a Second Audit
The underwriter's questionnaire is a prioritized controls roadmap; your renewal terms are a risk metric. Mine both and close the coverage-gap traps early.
Fraud and Security Are One Threat Model
Account takeover, synthetic identity, and scams sit between fraud and security — one adversary split across two budgets. Fuse the threat model and the signal.
Operational Resilience Is Not a DR Plan
A DR plan brings systems back; resilience keeps the service inside a limit the board owns — impact tolerances, service mapping, testing to failure.
Insider Risk Without Becoming Surveillance
Insider risk is a governance program across HR, legal, privacy, and security — not a DLP purchase. Monitor the assets that carry the loss, not the people.
Run a Human-Risk Program, Not Awareness
Training completion is the cleanest number in the board deck and the least tied to risk. Score human risk per team and measure behavior, not attendance.
Put a Dollar Figure on the Risk Register
A heat map's red cell is a category, not a quantity. FAIR-style quantification puts a dollar range on each risk that the CFO can weigh against controls spend.
Fair Lending: The Real AI Governance Problem
Mapping models to AI frameworks isn't governance for credit. The binding constraint is fair-lending law — ECOA/Reg B, FCRA adverse action, SR 11-7 model risk.
A Convincing Voice Is Not Authenticated
A cloned voice with matching caller-ID is recognition, not authentication. Move trust onto channels you control: callback on record, dual authorization.
Cyber and AI Oversight From the Board Seat
Reporting to a board and sitting on one are different jobs. What reporting taught me about cyber and AI oversight, and what I'd ask from the director's seat.
'We Don't Train on Your Data' Is Not Enough
An agent told to open no files obeyed — while the product uploaded the whole repo, canary included. "We don't train on your data" answers the wrong question.
Your Prompt Is the Approval. That's the Gap.
An MCP connector executes writes with no approval screen — your prompt becomes the one boundary nobody governed. That missing gate is a control-plane gap.
Your AI Policy Is a PDF. Agents Can't Read It
A model given thousands of extra words wrote better prose — and failed the delivery contract two runs in three. Rules agents can ignore fail audits.
Prove You Need the Agent Before the Swarm
Token spend explained ~80% of variance in multi-agent runs; most "AI failures" are provisioning mistakes. Treat a swarm as segregation of duties.
Shadow AI: Your "Personal Tool" Is Production
A coding agent stands up a data-touching tool in an afternoon. The moment it needs a login or gets shared, it's a production system nobody reviewed.
Context Custody Is a Concentration Risk
Intelligence went cheap, yet enterprise buyers expect to pay more for Claude. You're not paying for the brain — you're paying for where your context lives.
Why We Built AgentOS
One model scored 78% in one agent harness and 42% in another. In regulated fintech the harness is where governance lives, so we built our own: AgentOS.
Your Security Program Is a Sales Asset
Why provable security closes deals in regulated industries — and why the next budget conversation should lead with revenue, not fear.
The Audit Passed in March. Is It Still True?
Point-in-time certification is the floor, not the goal. The case for continuous assurance over annual audits — and what it takes to run it year-round.
The 2026 AI Regulatory Map on One Page
Everyone read 'EU AI Act deferred to 2027' and exhaled — but the part fining 3% of global revenue turns on in August. The four 2026 rules with teeth.
The Eight-Domain Azure Security Review
A tool scores your Azure posture; an assessor walks your architecture. The eight domains I review, in audit order, and the evidence each has to produce.
The New Security Leader's First 90 Days
Hired to build a security function from nothing? The trap isn't moving too slow — it's freezing the business. How to triage, ship quick wins, and earn budget.
Incident Response: The First 24 Hours
Most IR plans are binders nobody opens at 2 a.m. What has to happen in the first day of a breach — roles, decision rights, evidence, and a comms cadence.
Zero Trust for Humans: Just-in-Time Access
Everyone's obsessing over non-human identity. Meanwhile your humans sit on standing admin rights — and the fix only works if people will actually use it.
Third-Party Risk When You ARE the Third Party
Serving 1,500+ financial institutions means vendor-risk teams audit you constantly. Done right, that scrutiny becomes the fastest way to close your next deal.
Threat Intel Your Sales Team Will Brag About
Most threat intel dies as a PDF nobody reads. Done right, it sharpens your defense and becomes something your account team wants to put in front of customers.
Warm Standby Is a Promise You Have to Test
A DR plan you have never exercised is a hypothesis with a logo on it. Warm standby only counts as a promise if you test the failover before you need it.
Data Privacy Is an Operations Problem
Every privacy promise rests on unglamorous plumbing — consumer-rights workflows, retention, DLP. Treat privacy as an operating program, not an annual PDF.
Agent Onboarding Was Easy. Offboarding Isn't.
Every team shipped an agent in a weekend. Almost none can say how it gets fired, what credentials it still holds, or who would notice if it went rogue.
Anchoring Bias Is Already in Your KYC Agent
The failure modes that made medical LLMs unsafe sit inside your fraud, dispute, and onboarding agents. They don't announce themselves — you have to hunt.
Agent Memory Is a Data-Residency Problem
Give every agent a durable, MCP-connected brain and you've stood up a new data lake of PII and PCI scope nobody classified, encrypted, or can purge.
Your Browser Agent Has Your Cookies
Browser AI agents don't request access to your systems — they inherit it from the authenticated sessions in your tabs. A threat model nobody provisioned for.
Agent Safety: Engineer the Blast Radius
Most agent "safety" is a politely worded request to a model that need not honor it. The only controls that count still hold after the model goes wrong.
An AI Agent Dropped Prod: The Change Playbook
Coding agents are committing real change to real systems. The question isn't whether to let them — it's how to give them speed without a SOC 2-fatal mistake.
PCI DSS 4.0 Without the Last-Minute Scramble
PCI DSS 4.0 didn't add a longer checklist — it changed who does the thinking. Bake continuous-control expectations into engineering, not audit-week cramming.
Shadow-Agent Discovery for Regulated FIs
Unsanctioned AI agents already run in your environment with your credentials. Find, classify, and gate them before they touch member data or an exam does.
Source-Map Leaks: Your Pipeline's Confession
One packaging mistake can publish hundreds of thousands of lines of internals. The leak is a confession: release controls never caught up to release velocity.
AI Found 271 Bugs in Firefox. Now Your Repos?
AI-assisted fuzzing found hundreds of bugs in hardened open-source code. The question is whether you run it before someone else runs it against you.
How to Survive an FFIEC Exam
An exam isn't a pop quiz you cram for. It's referenceable proof of control — run it right and the examiner's findings become your best sales collateral.
Dark Code Is a Control Failure, Not Tech Debt
AI is filling repos with code nobody can explain. We call it tech debt; it's a control failure — and it should fail CI like a missing approver does.
Make Your Enterprise Agent-Readable First
Everyone is racing to buy agents; almost no one builds the substrate that lets them act safely. The productivity is real — so is the blast radius.
Fine-Grained Authorization for Fintech APIs
Authorization scattered across your codebase isn't a feature — it's a liability you can't prove. The pattern multi-tenant regulated platforms actually need.
Aurora DSQL for the Ledger: Active-Active
Multi-region active-active sounds like the answer to ledger nightmares. Interrogate the consistency, recovery math, and migration before betting the books.
Autonomous Pentesting in a Regulated Shop
A tool that scans and exploits your estate on its own schedule is a gift and a loaded gun. The scoping, approvals, and evidence I'd want before it runs.
Three Token Counts, Zero You Can Attest To
Codex says one number, Claude another, your gateway a third. That isn't a metering problem — it's an attestation problem regulated industries can't afford.
Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT
Every abandoned notebook and weekend prototype is a credential-bearing asset nobody owns. The fix isn't a ban — it's discovery, demotion, and real sunsets.
Consolidate SecOps on OCSF, Not Aggregators
Dashboard sprawl isn't a tooling gap you fix with more tooling — it's a schema problem. Standardize on OCSF and the single pane of glass becomes real.
Your Agent Dashboard Is Green and Lying
Uptime tiles tell you the service answered — nothing about whether the answer was right. That gap is where a model-risk review will eat you alive.
WAF in the Agent Era: Good Bots vs. Abuse
Agents are now real customers hitting your edge with real economics. The old bot question — human or machine? — is the wrong one. Here's the one that matters.
Guardrails at Scale for a Three-Person Team
A lean team can govern a sprawling cloud estate without becoming a ticket queue — but only if you put the rules in the pipeline, not in your inbox.
Start Post-Quantum Migration in 2026
Post-quantum cryptography stopped being research and became a config task. The teams that win aren't waiting for a quantum computer — they wait for nothing.
Evidence as Code: Make the Next Audit Boring
Audits feel like fire drills because evidence is hunted after the fact. Machine-readable SOC reports and modern PCI rules let proof live in the pipeline.
Building or scaling a fintech platform?
I advise fintechs, banks, and regulated SaaS on security programs, regulator readiness, and AI governance that ships.