Section E · Commissions
Advisory commissions from Vasiliy Uvarov: production rebuilds, retained AI architecture support, and fixed-scope AI estate audits for regulated fintech.
Twenty Years of Replacing
Processes That Stopped Working.
Not an AI practice. A longer habit that AI happens to be the current instrument for — taking a process a business has outgrown, and replacing it with one that runs.
The Record
The Ledger.
Seven processes, dated, with what replaced them and what can be produced if the claim is challenged.
| Year | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | A 78-node visual automation nobody could test or debug | A tested service with tracing and PII scrubbing at the boundary UK EMI · agent platform Evidence: 170 tests green · OpenTelemetry spans · redaction at ingress |
| 2026 | 135 repositories no one could hold in their head at once | One coordination layer: every route and service catalogued UK EMI · engineering estate Evidence: Whole-estate route and service inventory · 545 regulatory gaps catalogued across 12 domains |
| 2024 | Decisions taken from licensed BI dashboards and a spreadsheet | A self-serve BI layer inside a running OKR cycle, with owners on each metric UK EMI · analytics and operating cadence Evidence: Migration shipped; cadence still running two years on |
| 2023 | An onboarding funnel converting in the single digits, with a backlog behind it | Conversion roughly tripled and the backlog cut back by more than half Independent product consultancy · client under NDA Evidence: Funnel instrumented before and after; figures held under NDA |
| 2023 | B2B KYB taking ninety days per corporate | B2B KYB taking twelve, on document extraction ECOMMPAY · payments Evidence: Cycle-time measured on the same pipeline before and after |
| 2022 | Half the platform pinned to legacy dependencies | Modular KYC/AML, dependencies replaced Moscow Exchange · market infrastructure Evidence: £1.7M annual saving, signed off internally |
| 2018 | SME loan origination taking fourteen days, by hand | Origination under a day, with 100+ RPA bots behind it Bank Otkritie · SME lending Evidence: Book grew ₽70B → ₽130B over the programme |
Client names are withheld where the work sits under NDA. Every row can be walked through in detail in a conversation, including the parts that did not go to plan.
A Built Capability
Governance knowledge, with the evidence attached.
A live technical capability that retrieves approval-gated, in-scope sources, returns cited evidence, and abstains when the corpus is silent.
- Context
- UK EMI · governance knowledge
- Control receipt
- Entity isolation · approval and supersession gates · evidence IDs · retrieval and citation evals
- Claim boundary
- Built and served as a retrieval capability; not presented as proof that the former evidence-assembly process has stopped, or as external production certification.
Occasionally Available
Three Commissions.
Occasionally taken alongside a full-time executive seat, when the fit is right. The first is the one worth having.
[01]
The Rebuild
One process that has stopped working, replaced with something that runs in production and that your team can maintain after I stop.
- Shape
- A defined engagement against a named process, ending in a handover.
- Suited to
- A firm that already knows which process is broken and wants it replaced rather than described.
- You are left with
- Running code in your repositories, tests, traces, and a handover session — not a slide deck.
[02]
The Bench
A standing seat for a team already building. Architecture review, escalation on hard calls, and a decision trail for the client owners who remain accountable.
- Shape
- Retained monthly, with a fixed number of days.
- Suited to
- A regulated firm whose engineers are moving fast enough that the governance question has become real.
- You are left with
- Written positions on the decisions taken, and an audit trail that survives a supervisory conversation.
[03]
The Audit
A short, unsentimental read of an AI or automation estate: what is real, what is theatre, what will not survive a regulator asking about it.
- Shape
- Two to three weeks, fixed scope, fixed fee.
- Suited to
- A board or executive that has been told the AI programme is going well and would like that checked.
- You are left with
- A findings document ranked by exposure, and a sequenced plan you can execute without me.
The Small Print
Terms, Plainly.
Regulated experience is context, not an approval of this work. I am an FCA-approved EMD Individual, assessed against the Chief Product Officer seat, and now serve as Chief Data & AI Officer, UK EMIat the same firm. That status concerns management of the regulated firm. It is not an AI qualification, does not approve these commissions, and does not transfer a client’s legal or regulatory accountability to an external adviser.
A small number, alongside the day job.The executive seat comes first and is not negotiable; commissions are taken only where they do not compete with it. That is a real constraint on volume, and it is the reason the Rebuild is listed first — it is the work worth spending the constraint on.
No rates on this page. Scope decides the number, and scope is a conversation. What I will commit to before that conversation: a fixed fee against a fixed scope, and a written note of anything I think will not work before we start rather than after.
What you can check before writing. The skills and agents library is public under MIT (opens in a new tab), so the structure of how I build agents can be read without an NDA or a sales call.
Classifieds
Three Notices.
- The orchestration library is public and MIT-licensed. No NDA, no call required. Inspect the repository (opens in a new tab)
- What an AI governance leader in a regulated firm actually does day to day is a fifteen-minute conversation, not a pitch. Ask for the fifteen minutes
- Name the process you want replaced. Write in
Enquiries
Writing In.
Name the process you want replaced. That is a more useful opening than a calendar invitation, and it is enough for me to say honestly whether this is worth either of our time.