Beach Finance

Beach is a savings and investments platform. It’s regulated, it holds people’s money, and the technology and compliance work had outgrown being done part-time. It needed someone senior to own both, and to answer for them to the board.

The job was CTO and CISO on a fractional basis: set the technical strategy, design and build the platform, and put the controls in place.

What the work involved

The first few weeks went on learning the business before changing anything: where the risk was, what the team already did well, and which decisions were stuck because nobody owned them.

Then the work ran on three fronts. The platform itself, built from scratch: the customer app, the staff portal, the APIs between them and the AWS infrastructure underneath, integrated with WealthKernel for the investment side. A technology roadmap the leadership team could plan against. And the governance a regulated financial service needs: access control, audit logging and monitoring, data protection, and security reporting the board can actually read.

Architecture and compliance turned out to be the same job. How environments are separated, who can access what, what gets logged: each one is a technical decision and a security decision. It’s cheaper to make them once than to retrofit one onto the other.

The best technical decisions are the ones that, written down, read like common sense.

Where it stands

Beach has a clear technical direction, a security posture that holds up to scrutiny, and a leadership team that can make calls about technology without being engineers. I’m still there on a fractional basis, a few days a month.