A team of ten has forty-five pairs of people who may need to agree and every stand-up and "quick question" is that graph being walked. Ours is a hub: a small senior team holds the design, every module has a named engineer who owns it, the machine executes and your signatories and an independent auditor sit on the rim. Each path is a signed document rather than a meeting.
The people below take the first call and do the work. Between them they have delivered lending, collections, corporate-finance and high-volume transaction platforms for banks, a tax authority, insurers and retailers and run programme offices inside tier-1 investment banks. Nobody is handed off after the first meeting.
Mark KayserDelivery and Product Lead · Founder
- Corporate-finance platforms at scale
- Founder and CEO of Fluid (2013-2022), a portfolio and project-finance platform he designed, specified and guided from concept to deployment. Fluid processed over US$1bn of corporate project spend for tier-1 bank clients, integrating with SAP for costings, timesheets and supplier spend.
- Tier-1 banking programme leadership
- Head of Strategic Execution, reporting to the Group COO and Head of Enterprise PMO at Absa / Barclays Africa. At Deutsche Bank in London, Central PMO for Global Business Services and Global PMO for Credit, Rates and FX, setting the financial controls and delivery standards for the bank's change portfolio. Earlier programme roles at Clifford Chance and BNY Mellon.
- Building tech products since 2003
- Two decades of specifying and shipping financial technology for demanding institutional owners, now applied to AI-orchestrated builds.
Trevor JacobsTechnical Lead and Architect · CTO, 33signals builds
- Debt collection and lending-book systems
- Built and ran large-scale debt collection platforms for SARS, Old Mutual and Woolworths: multi-million-record books, strict data integrity, recovery workflows and reporting for regulated and listed owners.
- High-volume money movement
- Engineered the platform for an international online betting operator handling multi-million monthly wagers and payouts across markets, with peak loads of 7,000-15,000 concurrent users, where every cent must reconcile.
- Resilience and financial instruments
- Designed high-availability, fully mirrored data environments for instant failover with zero downtime. Built a public tax-free investment platform and corporate transactional-services systems working directly with financial instruments and interest calculations. Technical lead across the 33signals portfolio, including a regulated telehealth CRM.
Will GreenGrowth and Partnerships Lead · Co-founder
- Capital relationships across institutional and cross-border investors
- Chairman of the non-profit MCC, stewarding a $225m trust providing securities to JSE-listed Naspers, Times Media and Caxton and the public broadcaster SABC. Led the Planet43 accelerator for R3i Capital, connecting DeepTech and Applied AI founders to Series A capital from Striders Corporation, Hatcher and Pureterra Ventures.
- Multi-market government and corporate stakeholder navigation
- Developed the go-to-market strategy for the African insurance industry's $2.6bn customer liability problem, across stakeholders in multiple national markets. Retained by Knife Capital in 2019 to scale its Grindstone accelerator, sourcing and supporting 74 companies and 150+ founders through the pandemic.
- Global investor and founder network, built over 25 years
- Supported 240+ scale-ups and 350+ founders across Sub-Saharan Africa, the GCC, the UK, the EU, JAPAC and North America. Advised and worked with Yahoo, Sky, Unilever, Manchester United, Standard Bank, Google, Amazon and Deloitte.
Humfry IkeResearch and Product Intelligence · Technical execution
- Research and product intelligence
- Market analysis, product research and content intelligence across AI, meeting intelligence, workflow automation, digital products and venture development. Through Meetings.work and related technology projects, the synthesis of complex information into clear, actionable insight - the evidence behind the figures on this page is his to keep current.
- AI in business operations
- Focused on the intersection of AI and how organisations actually run: how intelligent systems change the way a business researches, decides, communicates and executes. Hands-on with the tools - AI research workflows, outreach and content automation and the software workflows the studio's builds run on.
- On the 33signals builds
- Product delivery and research across the studio's builds since 2025, sitting inside the build team rather than beside it. His question is never what the technology can do, but where it creates meaningful leverage for people and businesses - which is the question every build here starts with.
The requirements that decide a serious build, matched to the work that already covers them.
Controls that are non-negotiable from the first release
Financial controls and stage-gate design for bank change portfolios at Deutsche Bank and Barclays; instrument and facility logic in investment platforms.
Money that must reconcile to the cent, across entities and pools
Over US$1bn of corporate finance allocated, tracked and reconciled across cost centres and entities; multi-million monthly transaction ledgers reconciled to the cent.
Early warning - the signal months before the problem surfaces
Collections and recovery platforms for SARS, Old Mutual and Woolworths, where arrears signals, prioritisation and workflow are the core product; portfolios steered on behavioural lead indicators.
Transparency an institutional stakeholder trusts
Bank-grade MI built for Group COOs; mirrored, auditable data environments built for operators who cannot afford downtime.
Data sovereignty and IP ownership
SA-region processing, no client data used to train models, independent penetration test before live data, source and IP transferred on acceptance of each release.
A team that delivers without close supervision
Fixed-price releases, each with a commitment gate and an acceptance gate. The delivery and technical leads run the build day to day, with your project lead as the single point of contact.
Signal over noise. Everything else is just input.