A structure that looks right on paper but does not reflect how decisions are actually made is not a control, it is a liability waiting to surface.

Ignition Advisory works with financial institutions to assess, challenge, and strengthen the foundations of their risk and capital management system. This includes risk appetite frameworks, board and committee structures,, and the quality and depth of management reporting that reaches senior leadership.

We examine not just what is documented, but whether it is embedded, whether the people making decisions understand it, whether the culture supports it, and whether the institution could demonstrate its effectiveness under scrutiny.

Our role is to provide the kind of independent, substantive challenge that internal teams and familiar advisors find difficult to sustain. We identify what is genuinely working, what is cosmetic, and what requires attention before it becomes a problem that is significantly harder to resolve.

Many members are available to serve as independent directors. They are well-regarded operators from Finance, Legal, Risk and Investments, with prior CUOs, CEOs, CFOs, COO and CRO experience across regulated P&C and Life platforms. Known for sound judgement and steady governance, they bring credibility with regulators and investors and the trust of management teams.

Where a broader market is needed, we can work with our partners to run a discreet local and international search.

The decisions that shape a financial institution's capital position and financial structure are among the most consequential it will make. They are also the decisions most vulnerable to internal bias, optimistic assumptions, and the pressure to reach a particular conclusion.

Ignition Advisory provides senior, independent advisory across capital strategy, financial governance, and the control foundations that underpin how a financial institution operates and reports. We engage at the point where financial strategy intersects with risk, stress testing assumptions, interrogating structural implications, and ensuring decisions are grounded in a clear-eyed assessment of the institution's actual position.

That work spans financial controls design and SOX compliance, the alignment of finance operating models to how the business is actually structured, and the full spectrum of transaction-related financial advisory — from pre-deal diligence through M&A execution to the post-IPO transformation that follows a listing, where the demands on finance, controls, and reporting change materially and quickly.

We do not build the model and then defend it. We challenge it, and we do so before the cost of getting it wrong becomes apparent.

Operational vulnerabilities rarely announce themselves. They accumulate, through periods of rapid growth, leadership change, or the gradual erosion of controls that were never quite fit for purpose to begin with. By the time they surface, they are rarely cheap to fix.

Ignition Advisory works with financial institutions to design, challenge, and where necessary rebuild the operating models that sit at the heart of how the business actually functions. That means interrogating whether the structure of the organisation reflects the strategy it is trying to execute, whether the controls embedded in its processes are genuinely effective or merely documented, and whether the operational architecture can support the next stage of growth without accumulating the kind of risk that only becomes visible when something goes wrong.

This is not assessment for its own sake. It is the hard, practical work of aligning how the business is designed to how it needs to perform and ensuring that the gap between the two does not become a problem that the regulator, an acquirer, or a crisis surfaces before the institution does.

When a significant program requires senior leadership with the experience to deliver it and the credibility to hold it together when the complexity is real.

• Large-scale change programmes inside financial institutions carry risks that only become apparent once they are underway. Scope creep, resource constraints, competing priorities, a consulting firm who are not aligned and the gap between what is planned and what is actually deliverable are features of the landscape, not exceptions to it.

• Acquisitions, mergers, restructures, and leadership transitions all share a common characteristic: they compress time, elevate pressure, and narrow the space for the kind of independent thinking that the situation most requires.

Ignition Advisory provides senior risk and financial advisory through these periods, bringing external judgment to the assumptions embedded in a transaction, the structural risks that due diligence may not fully surface, and the governance and operational challenges that emerge in the period that follows.

We work alongside internal teams and transaction advisors, not to duplicate what they do, but to provide the independent challenge that those closest to the deal are rarely positioned to provide themselves. The question we are always asking is the one that is hardest to ask from the inside: what are we not seeing, and what happens if we are wrong?

Find out more about Ignition Coaching’s services:

• Executive & Leadership Coaching

• Team Coaching & Workshops

• Organizational Wellbeing

Item When an independent assessment of what is actually being delivered, against what was promised is needed.

Quality assurance is not a compliance exercise. It is a substantive check on whether the work is genuinely fit for purpose, whether the outputs meet the standard required, whether the risks are being properly managed, and whether the program or function will withstand the scrutiny it will inevitably face.

Ignition Advisory provides independent quality assurance across programmes, functions, and specific workstreams — bringing the seniority and direct experience required to assess what is in front of us, form a clear view, and communicate it without equivocation. We identify what is on track, what is not, and what needs to change before the cost of finding out the hard way becomes unavoidable.