The team
Senior at the table.
Scale behind it.
One named owner.
Two founders sign every engagement and answer for it end to end. Behind them: a governed AI workforce for delivery, senior practitioners for product work, engineering at scale for the big builds — and one named founder who never moves off the accountability.
Declan Ellard
Co-Founder & CEO
Two decades of enterprise transformation inside regulated organisations.
Designs the method — the operating model, the review discipline, the engagement architecture, the Sentinel method, the Citadel architecture. He wrote the corpus the workforce works to and chairs the review gates. In engagements: methodology, architecture, scope, board delivery.
Austin Sharpley
Co-Founder & COO
A career running operations in heavy industry and infrastructure.
Where the plan is judged by whether the thing actually ran. Drives delivery, fronts the client relationship end to end, and holds the standard that stops governance becoming paperwork. Runs the governed workforce day to day — how work is dispatched to the seats, and the controls that stop it.
Between them, and more besides:
- Airsweb
- Cabfind.com
- slicedbread
- Cara Digital
- Severn Glocon
- Cotswolds Trading Company
- Ozcorp
Personal delivery histories in regulated and heavy industry — not client logos. We do not trade on past agency work.
European representation
On the ground in Europe. Accountability still in the UK.
Michaël Roex
European Representative
First contact, the local relationship, and language across Europe.
Michaël is EAIC in Europe. A designer by training who builds as well as draws — websites, apps, the kind of work that has to function, not just look right — he is the first voice a European client hears and the one who keeps the relationship warm between engagements. Based just outside Veldhoven, he works across the Netherlands and the wider EU in the client's own language. The partner who signs the engagement is still UK-based, and still gets on the plane.
The bench
We scale the team. We never move the accountability.
Four tiers, each with its job. What never flexes: the named founder who signs the engagement is UK-based and carries it end to end.
Tier one
The partnership
Two founders who sign every engagement and answer for it end to end. They direct the governed AI workforce — the senior engineer seat, the nine disciplines, the review gates and the human boundary described on how we work.
Its job — signing the work, running the workforce, carrying the engagement to close.
Tier two
Senior practitioners on call
Six to seven C-suite-level practitioners from the top of UK fintech consulting; between them their careers cover every major UK bank and insurer; any one can be in the room inside two weeks.
Its job — supporting Sentinel and Citadel engagements.
Tier three
Engineering at scale
A global software engineering partner — a standing development team of around fifteen, scaling as an engagement demands, banking and insurance track record measured in decades, across Europe, the US and the Gulf. We describe them by capability rather than name; under NDA we are happy to go into detail.
Its job — the larger product builds and ventures that need the scale of a global engineering function.
Tier four
Specialist firms
Two in India, two in Eastern Europe, each with capability that cannot be bought off a shelf. Every one delivered alongside by our people; every office visited. Not procured — earned onto the list. Names withheld because their client lists are theirs, not ours.
Its job — deep, narrow capability at the moment it is needed.
How we work with all of it
The named founder is the constant.
Whoever else touches the work — workforce, practitioners, partner engineers, specialists — the engagement is signed by one named founder, UK-based, who answers for it end to end. The escalation path reaches that person directly. There is no layer between you and the decision.
The standard the workforce works to
The nine seats are governed by the review discipline published on how we work — the same decomposition, review and escalation discipline runs on every engagement, whatever size the team around it.
Thirty minutes with the person who would sign.
No account manager sits between you and the founders. Book a call and you get a founder.
Founder-led · NDA available · Price agreed before we start