Invicta Advisors

Starting with a focus of deep technical understanding, I started my career first at big tech, before moving to financial services. I wanted to understand what good engineering looked like before trying to lead it. That foundation carried me from contract developer at UBS and HSBC through to Managing Director at Man Group, where I led six teams across trading technology, data science and execution. The lesson that stuck: getting the organisation right, aligning stakeholders, and developing other leaders will beat any individual technical contribution. I founded Invicta Advisors in March 2024 to put that to work, providing fractional CTO and strategic advisory to startups and scale-ups in financial services and technology.

How I think about leadership

Management is a learned discipline. Too many strong engineers get promoted into management roles and left to figure it out alone, with predictable results, for them and for their teams. I treat management as its own craft, anologous to technology, but with wider organisational impact.

The other lesson, learned the hard way, is that most “technology problems” in organisations of any size turn out to be organisational ones. Wrong team boundaries, broken communication channels, unclear ownership, business-technology friction. Fix those first and the technology gets a lot easier.

Why Invicta

I started Invicta because I wanted to apply twenty years of experience across multiple companies rather than one. The fractional model also suits the work — most growing companies don’t need a full-time CTO, but they do need senior technology judgement, and they often need it now.

I’m based in the UK and work primarily with UK-headquartered startups and scale-ups, in or adjacent to financial services.

How I work

I am not a consultant who writes reports. I embed as a member of the leadership team, take accountability, and stay until the work is finished. I can write production code, design architecture and lead AI adoption, but my primary value is organisational rather than individual contribution. I work in the open, in plain language, and I’d rather have a hard conversation early than a worse one later.

If that sounds like the kind of help you need, get in touch.