Independent
No product to sell. No preferred vendor. Advice aligned to your interests.
Banking transformation, AI, and new rails
Banking change gets expensive when strategy, architecture, and control drift apart.
SCI-CO provides independent specialist support for banks, fintechs, and transformation teams on the decisions that determine whether transformation succeeds — across operating model, architecture, AI, and new rails, including hands-on specialist integration work.
What we do
Clearer decisions. Better operating choices. Less expensive drift.
The hardest banking decisions cut across business, architecture, controls, Treasury, operations, and delivery. Most engagements treat these as separate workstreams. We do not.
SCI-CO provides senior support at the point where those disciplines converge, helping leadership teams make decisions that hold under scrutiny and translate clearly into delivery.
Senior-led
Every engagement is led directly by Simon MacDonald from day one.
Cross-disciplinary
Business, technology, controls, and delivery treated as a single design problem.
Insights
Practical notes on banking change, AI, and digital assets
The work informs the writing. Start with the series on banks, new rails, and digital assets, or browse the wider archive of notes.
March 2026
The market is noisy. Banks still need to decide.
Crypto, tokenisation, and new rails generate plenty of commentary. The harder question for banks is what they need to change in practice.
March 2026
Do banks really need crypto? Only where it solves a real banking problem.
The question is not whether crypto matters in the abstract. It is where new rails solve a real banking problem strongly enough to justify the operating change.
March 2026
Most crypto pilots prove the tech. Very few prepare the bank.
A pilot should not only test whether the technology works. It should show whether the bank has a credible path to getting ready for what comes next.
Delivery model
Senior-led by design.
Scaled when needed.
Every engagement is led directly by Simon MacDonald. For the right projects, SCI-CO brings together trusted specialists around the client need, including hands-on implementation and specialist integration work. The team is assembled to fit the problem rather than the other way around.
Clients work directly with the person doing the thinking. No hand-offs to junior teams. No boilerplate deliverables. Where broader capability is needed, it is brought in carefully and kept close to the work.
- Direct access to senior expertise throughout
- Support scoped to the specific decision, build, or integration challenge
- Trusted specialist network deployed where needed
Focus areas
Transformation and Architecture
Programme governance, operating model redesign, technology architecture, and specialist support for complex banking change.
Digital Assets and New Rails
Strategic, operating model, and specialist integration support for institutions engaging with tokenisation, digital assets, and next-generation payment infrastructure.
Data, AI, and Control Visibility
Practical strategy for AI adoption in regulated environments, data architecture, and the control and implementation foundations required for sustainable governance.
Get in touch
Start a conversation
If you're facing a decision where strategy, architecture, controls, and delivery need to speak to each other — we should talk.
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