Invicta Advisors

Three recent Invicta engagements, sketched in enough detail to show what fractional CTO and advisory work involves in practice.

Fractional CTO - FinTech SaaS

Context. A fixed income data analytics company serving global investment banks and asset managers. A small engineering team that had grown organically, in both technology and internal operations. Two regulatory changes coming with hard deadlines.

What I did. Embedded as fractional CTO and member of the leadership team. More than doubled the development team across four countries and restructured the group into delivery squads with clear ownership. Focused on the business-technology relationship by changing how engineering committed to and communicated work. Delivered both regulatory programmes on time and without incident. Led the company’s AI adoption programme. Covered the CISO function and presented at board level throughout.

Outcome. A functioning engineering organisation with a collaborative relationship with the commercial side of the business, and two regulatory deadlines met without incident.

Co-Founder & CTO - AI Data Company

Context. An early-stage AI company extracting financial data from semi-structured sources for private credit funds. Founded with a co-founder from a private credit background. No existing product, no engineering team.

What I did. Designed and built the product end-to-end as the hands-on CTO. The core technical contribution was a novel three-stage pipeline that separates AI-driven data discovery from deterministic extraction, with a human in the loop at the boundary. The architecture guarantees that no extracted figure depends on a model’s judgement, eliminating hallucination risk for clients who cannot tolerate it.

Outcome. Product in UAT with the first end client. A second firm approaching proof-of-concept. The architectural approach has been well received by clients evaluating other vendors who have struggled with hallucinations.

Strategic Advisory - B2B Marketplace

Context. A 110-person technology department at a UK-based scale-up that had outgrown its founder-led technical structure. No dedicated SRE, data or IT functions. Platform availability under pressure as the business grew.

What I did. Led strategic recruitment for the leadership gaps and team expansion, including Head of Data & Head of SRE. Performed a comprehensive technical deep dive across the estate and reworked the development processes to support cross-team collaboration rather than fight it. Headed up a data transformation programme that consolidated business intelligence onto a single source of truth.

Outcome. Three new organisational functions established and led by senior hires. New development best practices established.

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If you’d like to talk about whether this kind of help fits your situation, drop me a line.