Institutions building capability
Our clients are operators. They are building a business in digital assets, or running one already, and they need the technology and the analysis to do it properly.
Four kinds of client
- Authorised crypto-asset service providers
- You hold the licence. We build what you run under it. Reporting and monitoring technology, custody and key management architecture, settlement and position systems, data infrastructure. We sit inside your outsourcing governance, we document to the standard your supervisor expects, and we never propose to hold assets or key material. You cannot outsource that to us, and we will not ask you to.
- Banks and investment firms
- Full ICT third-party treatment, from the first workshop. Register of information entries, audit and access rights, exit planning, concentration and subcontracting transparency, and integration with the core banking, treasury, risk and data systems you already run. We expect the questionnaire and we are built to answer it.
- Market infrastructure and financial technology companies
- Systems that have to work at somebody else's scale. Market data infrastructure, analytics engines, on-chain services and the integration layers between them. Typically longer builds, multi-vendor, with our teams accountable for the technical outcome rather than a workstream.
- Corporates and technology companies
- Building a digital asset capability inside an existing business. Business case, operating model, architecture and build. The lightest contracting of the four, and usually the fastest to get moving. Where a question turns from how to build a capability into what to do with a balance sheet, we stop and say so.
We work with businesses about their business.
A bank deciding how to architect a platform, which capabilities to own, or how to sequence a roadmap is acting as an operator of a business. That is the work we do.
A firm deciding what to hold on its own balance sheet is acting as an investor. That is not our work, and no engagement of ours extends to it. Where a mandate touches both, we scope it explicitly in writing: our work concerns the design, build and operation of your own business capability, and expressly excludes recommendations about your acquisition, disposal or holding of crypto-assets.
We are straightforward about this because it is the difference between a technology partner your compliance function can approve and one it cannot.
Not sure which one you are?
Most institutions are somewhere between two of these. A short conversation usually settles it faster than a proposal does.