Leaving the Bank to Build

At the end of March, I stepped down as the bank's Chief Data Officer to start a company. I have been turning over how to write this, because the easy version sounds like a story about leaving, and that is not how it feels from the inside. It feels like the opposite. Four years inside a bank, first running technology and then its data, taught me the industry. The problem that actually pulled me out is younger than that. It took shape over the last couple of years, as AI went from a curiosity almost no one took seriously to something every institution suddenly had to make real. I could see it clearly and could only ever work around it, and at some point working around it stopped being enough.

The Same Wall

The thing that reshaped my thinking was realizing the wall I kept hitting was not mine alone. AI did not become urgent in banking overnight. For a long stretch it sat off to the side, interesting but not pressing. Then, fairly recently, it turned into something every regulated business had to figure out at once, and almost all of them ran into the same problem. The tools were everywhere and the value stayed thin, because the structure that would make AI dependable and governed and grounded mostly did not exist yet. From the inside of one institution it looked local. The wider I looked, the clearer it got that it is everywhere, and that almost no one is building the thing that would actually close it.

Why Build

I have started things before, and I know the pull. There is a particular itch that comes from seeing a problem clearly and believing you know what the answer has to look like. Walking away from a stable seat to chase that is not a small decision, and I did not make it lightly. It kept winning out over every reason to stay put. Four years learning this industry from the inside taught me why its caution is earned and how much the trust underneath it matters. That education is exactly what makes me think the answer has to come from someone who respects all of it, the caution and the trust and the rules, not from outside the world it serves. I would rather be the one who tries.

What I Carry Forward

I am leaving with more gratitude than I expected. The view from inside a bank taught me things I could not have learned any other way. That relationships matter more than technology. That the people who write and enforce the rules are partners in a hard problem, not obstacles to it. That moving carefully is not the same as moving slowly for no reason. None of that gets left behind. I expect to stay close to the people and the institutions I learned from, only from a different seat. If anything it becomes the foundation for what comes next, because the whole point is to build something that honors how this world actually works.

What Comes Next

The company is called XipHub. I will save what it does in full for when it is ready to show. For now it is enough to say what it is for. It gives regulated businesses a way to use AI that is governed, grounded, and kept inside their own walls, so the technology serves the trust instead of putting it at risk. That is the problem I could not stop circling, and I am glad to finally be launching the answer.