Independent
No product to sell. No preferred vendor. Advice aligned to your interests.
Independent advisory practice
Banking change gets expensive when strategy, architecture, and control drift apart.
SCI-CO is an independent advisory practice. We work with banks, fintechs, and transformation teams on the decisions that determine whether transformation succeeds — across operating model, architecture, AI, and new rails.
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 advisory engagements treat these as separate workstreams. We do not.
SCI-CO provides senior advisory 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, and controls treated as a single design problem.
Focus areas
Transformation and Architecture
Programme governance, operating model redesign, and technology architecture for banks and fintechs navigating complex change.
Digital Assets and New Rails
Strategic and operating model advisory 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 frameworks required for sustainable governance.
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, 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.
- Direct access to senior expertise throughout
- Engagements scoped to the specific decision or challenge
- Trusted specialist network deployed where needed
Insights
Practical notes on banking change, AI, and digital assets
February 2026
The transformation debt that doesn't appear on the balance sheet
Banks accumulate invisible costs when strategy, architecture, and delivery lose coherence. Understanding how that drift accumulates is the first step to correcting it.
January 2026
Why AI governance in financial services requires an operating model, not just a policy
Policy documents do not govern AI in practice. Institutions getting this right are building governance into how decisions are made day to day.
December 2025
CBDC and tokenised deposits: what banks need to decide before 2027
The technical choices are narrowing. The strategic decisions about positioning, participation, and operating model remain largely unmade.
Get in touch
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If you're facing a decision where strategy, architecture, and operations need to speak to each other — we should talk.
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