Strategy Innovations works with banks, investors and institutions in emerging markets. We take a venture from feasibility study and regulatory licensing through to business model, capital structure and go-live — and we build the technology platforms and engineering teams that make it operate.
Start a conversation Our divisionsMost advisory firms stop at the report. We don't. Our work runs the full arc of establishing a regulated financial institution: the feasibility study and demand assessment that test whether it should exist at all; the business model, product mix and capital structure that define what it is; the licensing, governance and compliance frameworks that make it permissible; and the programme management that carries it to its first day of trading.
Alongside that we are standing up a second division, because in emerging markets the binding constraint is rarely capital — it is systems and skills. It is designed to build the technology capability financial institutions actually need, and the talent organisations behind it: engineering delivery, AI and data capability, and academies that create a sustainable supply of technologists rather than importing one.
We work where the opportunity is structural rather than incremental — markets building financial infrastructure for the first time, where an institution designed well at the right moment can shape how a whole market develops.
And we build to hand over. Our engagements are designed around knowledge transfer, with local teams shadowed, trained and progressively given the reins. The measure of our success is that the institution runs without us.
Clients come to us to establish something that does not yet exist. Some engage a single division; most find they need both, because an institution and the technology that runs it are the same problem viewed from two sides.
We design, licence and stand up regulated financial institutions — investment banks, broker-dealers, advisory businesses and the shared and consortium structures that make them viable in young markets, where no single institution can carry the cost or the risk alone.
The division advises and builds. It does not itself trade, deal or hold client assets.
Testing whether the institution should exist at all, and saying so plainly if it should not.
Defining what the institution is and how it earns.
Making the institution permissible, and keeping it that way.
Designing who owns it, who governs it, and how they leave.
Numbers a board and a regulator can interrogate.
Turning an approved plan into an operating institution.
In build. This division is being established now — delivery capability, university partnerships and the first client engagements are in formation. We are talking to clients who want to shape it, and to be first in the queue when it opens.
It is designed as a single system rather than a set of separate services. The academy trains technologists; the strongest join the delivery teams or a client's own engineering function; others are placed through recruitment. Delivery engagements surface hiring needs, and hiring relationships surface delivery work. Each rotation lowers the cost of talent and deepens the client relationship.
Four core business lines, and a fifth to be pursued selectively as capability matures.
Specialist recruitment of technology and AI talent for international clients across the UK, Europe and the Gulf.
A managed, quality-assured engineering organisation — not a body shop — delivering to international standards.
Built with universities and colleges on a hire–train–deploy model: trained to secured demand, never to hope.
The systems a modern investment bank or broker-dealer runs on — designed, built and then productised.
Adjacent lines that arise naturally from the first four, pursued selectively as capability and capital allow.
Establishing an institution — or the technology organisation behind it — is not a single project but a sequence of gates, each of which can stop the venture. We structure engagements so that the expensive commitments come only after the cheap questions have been answered honestly.
Our current centre of gravity is East Africa, and Ethiopia in particular. It is one of the few places in the world where a national capital market is being built from the ground up: a legal framework enacted in 2021, a securities exchange that began trading in January 2025, and a regulator licensing the first generation of investment banks, dealers and advisers.
Institutions being designed now will set the standards the market inherits. That is unusually consequential work, and it is where we have concentrated our own research and design effort.
The same market makes the second half of our work urgent. International demand for technology and AI expertise continues to outstrip supply, while East Africa has a large, young and fast-growing graduate population. Connecting the two — properly trained, properly managed, delivering to international standards — is the opportunity we are building for.
If you are considering establishing a financial institution, building the technology capability behind one, or testing whether a venture stands up — we would be glad to talk.