For more than a decade, financial institutions have been told to go digital. Data strategies have been written, platforms migrated to the cloud, and front-end experiences wrapped in slick apps. But for Niamh Kingsley, founder of ace, that conversation is already out of date.
Her new firm, launched in November as a specialist post-digital advisory for financial services, is built on a simple but unsettling message: the industry is still thinking in terms of tools, when the real shift is that technology has become the environment itself.
Kingsley, formerly at Delta Capita and now CTO and board member at GMASS Consulting, the parent company of ace, has spent the past two years crystallising this view in boardrooms, client workshops and industry forums. ace is her answer to a recurring problem she saw in those conversations. Executives sense the ground is moving under their feet, but no one is helping them join the dots between AI, blockchain, quantum computing, robotics and new ways of working.
“In my work with clients, I was seeing this constant need to join the dots on the future landscape,” she said. “Somebody needed to be able to communicate that to clients.”
Post-digital Reality
Kingsley’s starting point is the idea of the “post-digital” world – not a buzzword of her own making, she stresses, but an evolution of how technology shapes society.
“Post-digital is where technology is the environment, not just the tool,” she explained.
In a digital world, firms digitise existing processes: online taxi booking, electronic health records, app-based banking. The process is recognisable but in a post-digital world, the process itself is rewritten.
She explains it this way. Hailing a cab with Uber is digital – a familiar service delivered through an app. A driverless taxi is post-digital – the combination of decentralisation, IoT, cloud, AI and extended reality alters what “taking a taxi” even is.
This distinction matters, she argues, because too many financial firms are still thinking only in terms of incremental automation.
“Digital transformation… is facilitating that parallelisation of some sort of journey or process,” she said. “But if you want to use your data and facilitate T+0… the environment has to change. That’s why we talk about things like blockchain being really relevant so that you have your atomic settlement.”
For Kingsley, the move from T+1 to T+0 settlement is emblematic. Simply speeding up existing processes is not enough. Achieving atomic settlement means rethinking the market structure itself and the role of central securities depositories – a textbook post-digital shift.
Data, Governance and “Digital Headcount”
Despite the talk of transformation, Kingsley is adamant that data remains the foundation.
“That’s not changed, it’s about having quality governance for data,” she says. “The only difference… is that when you’re defining your data strategy, you have to think about the implications and the onward journey of that data through this change from digital to post-digital.”
What changes is both the destination of the data and who, or what, consumes it. AI is no longer just a sophisticated analytics tool, for instance. It becomes “digital headcount”, agents and systems that take on parts of roles previously done by people, from underwriting assistants to portfolio optimisers, she says.
That in turn brings governance sharply into focus. For Kingsley, generative AI without governance is just theatre.
“It’s just a demo tool… it’s never going to move to production,” she argues. “You need… policy as code. You need evaluations, good lineage attestations, where appropriate, before you can talk about moving to production and removing the human in the loop.”
New Career in an Old Town
The decision to form ace, Kingsley says, was the product of a two-year journey of working with clients who were frustrated by the familiar pattern of expensive pilots, frameworks and proofs of concept that never translated into “run-the-bank” change.
“Lots of what I discuss with clients… is the fatigue that they have of working with other consultancies that do a pilot, or they do a framework, and it’s just, ‘let’s get your data in shape and then stand away from that’,” she said.
ace is designed to be different. It envisages a four-to-twelve-week “launch pad” that focuses on operationalising control over data and technology, rather than leaving clients with slideware.
“What we’re doing is looking at, effectively, a launch pad… to say, ‘look, you need an operationalised control plane of some kind of your data, so that as a CDO, your data estate just works’,” she said. “Rather than just having a proof of concept… that doesn’t drive results. We’re looking for, ‘what is that meaningful outcome? What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve for, and how does that fit into the post digital landscape?’.”
Her own move reflects that desire for end-to-end influence. ace was launched as a legally separate advisory firm from GMASS and is headquartered in London with work already underway there and in New York, Dublin and the Middle East.
Early traction has been strong enough that, while she declined to name names, she says the company already has multiple clients in London and New York, with some expected to go public about the partnership once initial phases are complete.
First-mover Risk – and Reward
Positioning ace as a “post-digital advisory” is both a differentiator and a communication challenge.
“Because we are genuinely the first mover in that post Digital Advisory space, it gives us an enormous benefit,” Kingsley said. “When we get in front of clients, they always say to me, ‘No one is talking to us about this.’”
But education is still a barrier, especially for institutions only now feeling comfortable with “digitalisation.”
“There is a risk, obviously, in being a first mover, that people go, ‘It’s not relevant to me’,” she said. “I found that it is relevant for people, which is great, and… I couldn’t have asked for more success in the launch of the company initially, and more positive reception from clients.”
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