Monthly Archives: January 2026

Aligning the Data Platform to Enterprise Data & AI Strategy

Leave a Reply

This article establishes the data platform as the execution engine of Enterprise Data & AI Strategy in Financial Services. It bridges executive strategy and technical delivery by showing how layered architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum), embedded governance, dual promotion lifecycles (North/South and East/West), and domain-aligned operating models turn strategic pillars, architecture & quality, governance, security & privacy, process & tools, and people & culture, into repeatable, regulator-ready outcomes. The result is a platform that delivers control, velocity, semantic alignment, and safe AI enablement at scale.

Continue reading →

The Zen Story of the Cup of Tea: How Awareness Opens Space

Leave a Reply

A Zen master overfills a visitor’s teacup to show that a mind already full has no space to receive. The problem is not knowing too much, but being unable to listen. Emptying the cup is not a single insight but an ongoing practice: noticing when we’ve stopped listening and allowing a small pause to create space. Have a cup of tea. Have another one.

Continue reading →

Migrating Legacy EDW Slowly-Changing Dimensions to Lakehouse Bronze

Leave a Reply

From 20-year-old warehouse SCDs to a modern temporal backbone you can trust. This article lays out a practical, regulator-aware playbook for migrating legacy EDW SCD dimensions to a modern SCD2 Bronze layer in a medallion/lakehouse architecture. It covers what you are really migrating (semantics, not just tables), how to treat the EDW as a source system, how to build canonical SCD2 Bronze, how to run both platforms in parallel, and how to prove to auditors and regulators that nothing has been lost or corrupted in the process.

Continue reading →

I Have a Full Set of Every Appearance of Flaming Carrot and I’m Not Afraid to Use It

Leave a Reply

I own every appearance of Flaming Carrot, not as memorabilia but as a working instrument. This is a short essay about absurdity used with discipline: carrots against false seriousness, mockery as a tool, and what happens when you refuse to let power keep its costume. Flaming Carrot isn’t just a forgotten indie gem; he’s symbolic weaponry. Pataphysics writ large.

Continue reading →

Enterprise Point-in-Time (PIT) Reconstruction: The Regulatory Playbook

Leave a Reply

This article sets out the definitive regulatory playbook for enterprise Point-in-Time (PIT) reconstruction in UK Financial Services. It explains why PIT is now a supervisory expectation: driven by PRA/FCA reviews, Consumer Duty, s166 investigations, AML/KYC forensics, and model risk, and makes a clear distinction between “state as known” and “state as now known”. Covering SCD2 foundations, entity resolution, precedence versioning, multi-domain alignment, temporal repair, and reproducible rebuild patterns, it shows how to construct a deterministic, explainable PIT engine that can withstand audit, replay history reliably, and defend regulatory outcomes with confidence.

Continue reading →

The Work Speaks for Itself

Leave a Reply

This article explains why I am stepping back from writing about neurodiversity as a primary lens for my work. Not because the subject no longer matters, but because over time it has begun to obscure achievement rather than illuminate it. This is a reflection on explanation, authority, and the point at which context stops being helpful and starts getting in the way.

Continue reading →

Building Regulator-Defensible Enterprise RAG Systems (FCA/PRA/SMCR)

Leave a Reply

This article defines what regulator-defensible enterprise Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) looks like in Financial Services (at least in 2025–2026). Rather than focusing on model quality, it frames RAG through the questions regulators actually ask: what information was used, can the answer be reproduced, who is accountable, and how risk is controlled. It sets out minimum standards for context provenance, audit-grade logging, temporal and precedence-aware retrieval, human-in-the-loop escalation, and replayability. The result is a clear distinction between RAG prototypes and enterprise systems that can survive PRA/FCA and SMCR scrutiny.

Continue reading →

The Hidden Costs of Masking: What Research and Autistic Voices Reveal

Leave a Reply

This article explores the hidden psychological, physical, and social costs of autistic masking, drawing on current research and lived experience. Combining academic insight with personal anecdotes, it examines how masking impacts wellbeing, identity, and burnout, and argues that masking is not an individual adaptation but a response to structural neurotypical norms and inequality embedded in modern social and professional life.

Continue reading →

Temporal RAG: Retrieving “State as Known on Date X” for LLMs in Financial Services

Leave a Reply

This article explains why standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) silently corrupts history in Financial Services by answering past questions with present-day truth. It introduces Temporal RAG: a regulator-defensible retrieval pattern that conditions every query on an explicit as_of timestamp and retrieves only from Point-in-Time (PIT) slices governed by SCD2 validity, precedence rules, and repair policies. Using concrete implementation patterns and audit reconstruction examples, it shows how to make LLM retrieval reproducible, evidential, and safe for complaints, remediation, AML, and conduct-risk use cases.

Continue reading →