IT consulting for London brokers, investment firms & City traders
Specialist infrastructure and security consulting for London financial-services SMBs. VPN architecture, Zero Trust access, secure remote working and data residency — designed around how your traders, advisers and back office actually work. Independent since 2020. 25+ years in IT infrastructure.
Generic IT support doesn’t cut it in financial services.
Your data is sensitive. Your traders need low-latency access from anywhere. Your compliance team needs audit trails. Your clients expect enterprise-grade security from a 15-person firm. Off-the-shelf managed IT, designed for generic SMBs, leaves gaps that only become visible after an incident.
I’ve spent 25+ years designing infrastructure for sites where security wasn’t optional — from Chelsea FC matchday operations to The Shard. Since 2020 I’ve applied that same architecture discipline to London brokers, investment firms and City traders under confidential contracts.
🔐 Data residency & sovereignty
Client trades, positions, research — all sensitive, often regulated. AI tools that send data to third-party providers create compliance risk you can’t unwind. I deploy private AI and secure pipelines that keep data inside your infrastructure.
📡 Secure remote & trading-desk access
Traders working from offices, clubs, homes, abroad. Most VPN setups I inherit are end-of-life, single-factor, or bolted together in 2020 and never revisited. I redesign around Zero Trust principles so access is per-application, not whole-network.
⚡ Low-latency, high-reliability
Trading desks can’t tolerate five-second VPN handshakes or flaky Wi-Fi. Network architecture designed for the actual workload — not generic office-worker defaults.
📋 Compliance-ready audit trails
FCA, GDPR, MIFID, internal compliance — every access request, every config change, logged and retrievable. Most firms I audit have no centralised logging at all. That’s fixable in weeks, not months.
VPN architecture, Zero Trust access, and AI that stays private.
Three pillars, integrated. Designed around how financial-services SMBs actually operate — not retrofitted from a managed-IT template.
VPN & Zero Trust Access
Modern VPN architecture (WireGuard, IPSec, Fortinet/Cisco), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) so users connect to specific applications not whole networks, MFA everywhere, device posture checks, privileged access management.
Private AI for Financial Services
Self-hosted LLMs running inside your infrastructure. Research summarisation, client communication drafts, compliance-ready document classification — with zero data sent externally. No ChatGPT leaking client positions.
Secure Infrastructure & Monitoring
Network segmentation, firewall hardening, endpoint detection & response (EDR), DNS filtering, centralised logging for audit, backup architecture that survives ransomware. The basics, done properly.
Senior consultant, still hands-on. 25+ years in the tooling.
Independent since 2020. All current client work delivered under confidential contracts. Past project experience includes senior infrastructure roles at The Shard, Chelsea FC, Silverstone Racing Circuit, Manchester Arndale and Ealing Council. References available on request.
Clear scope, fixed fee where possible, no scope creep.
Free 30-minute strategy call to diagnose. Paid scoping session if we progress. Written scope and fixed fee before any work starts. Weekly check-ins throughout. Full documentation — network diagrams, runbooks, credential vault, training — on handover. No vendor lock-in. Optional monthly retainer for ongoing strategic support.
Typical engagement: 4–6 weeks for a complete network refresh or secure-access overhaul. Larger programmes (cloud migration, private-AI deployment) run 10–20 weeks. Emergency interventions can start in days. See the full process →
Further reading for finance-firm decision makers
Cyber Essentials Plus for finance SMBs
How the certification maps onto FCA Operational Resilience and Consumer Duty expectations — scope, cost and timeline.
Private AI vs ChatGPT Enterprise
Where customer data, trade intelligence and research notes actually go with Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise and self-hosted alternatives.
Microsoft Copilot rollout without data leaks
The SharePoint audit, licensing decisions and DLP scoping that make Copilot safe for a regulated firm.
Your data and your traders’ desks should be locked down by default, not as an afterthought.
If your current IT setup was stitched together in a hurry, bolted-on over years, or inherited without documentation — book a free 30-minute strategy call. I’ll tell you honestly whether you need a full refresh or a surgical fix.
Free 30-min Strategy Call