Steve Michael.

Independent · applied across the group

Designing the layer that lets AI systems work against a company's real knowledge instead of a blank context window.

• Built a five-layer organisational brain: linked knowledge, a machine-readable graph index, a routing layer, a specialist capability registry and an execution runtime
• Encoded business process, brand standards, deployment constraints and safety rules as machine-readable instructions
• Established the operating discipline: retrieval before questions, verification before claims, approval gates on anything irreversible
• Applied it to live product work: project-aware coding agents, growth analysis, brand development and documentation

Co-founded ventures · fintech products

Taking trading and fintech products from concept to production: architecture, monetisation, growth and brand together.

• Co-founded a broker and prop-firm review directory fused with a social trading network and a copy-trading marketplace
• Designed the advertising and monetisation model, then the attribution architecture that would make the spend measurable
• Scoped a subscription expert-advisor business built on published specifications, server-side licensing and enforced risk ceilings
• Ran brand strategy and identity for both, including the category anti-patterns each brand had to avoid

An FX, prop-trading and payments group

Broad responsibility across the digital, technology, product and marketing operation of a brokerage group and its sub-brands, spanning five CFD and FX brokerages, three asset management firms, a prop-trading platform and a payments business.

• Production brokerage platform: account tiers, signup wizard, live spreads over a streaming price feed, partner programme, marketing-operations CMS
• Prop-trading product: live-pricing plan builder, platform comparison, partner portal, compliance-aware marketing language
• Copy-trading subscription product across web, iOS and Android, with an operations console behind it
• Internal payments BI: multi-format ingestion, commission ledger, branded PDF statements
• Integration of live MetaTrader and MT Manager data into customer-facing surfaces through APIs and sockets

Property, insurance and wealth clients

The same method applied to unfamiliar industries, which is the real test of whether a method is a method.

• Property investment business: public site plus a nineteen-page deal-pipeline CRM with automated sourcing, opportunity scoring and refurbishment costing
• Insurance and wealth brokerage: migration from WordPress to Next.js, five enquiry types consolidated onto one hardened API route, live financial calculators
• Each rebuilt from the operating model outward, not from a template inward

A retail forex brand

Ran the marketing function of a retail trading brand, with a department of around twenty reporting in.

• Owned digital marketing end to end: website, brand, social and campaign strategy
• Around twenty people in the function, and the vendor relationships around it
• Rebuilt the site and landing pages against engagement rather than against opinion
• The first role where the job was the department rather than the work inside it

Own venture, with one partner

A mobile trading product, co-owned and taken to market. Ended by regulation rather than by the founders.

• Built and launched a mobile product in a retail derivatives category, co-owned with one partner
• Killed by two external events in the same period: the EU retail ban on binary options, and the loss of payment providers
• Neither was survivable and neither was a build problem — the category closed and the rails went with it
• This is why the compliance-aware work elsewhere on this page exists. It is not a philosophical position

Independent, as his own agent

Wrote algorithmic trading strategies and sold them directly to investors to run on their own charting systems.

• Authored the strategies and closed the investors: the build and the sale were the same person
• Sold into a US-facing market, worked around the hours the rest of the week already had in it
• The first version of what the subscription expert-advisor work on this page is now — a decade earlier, and by hand

Retail trading and financial services firms

Started on the floor of a retail trading brand and worked every role in it, then ended up teaching the floor rather than working it.

• Moved into conversion and broke the company records for it
• Offered the conversion manager role on the back of that, and took retention instead
• Asked to teach sales across the whole company, to monthly intakes of thirty-plus
• Ran the education webinars to audiences of up to five thousand — trading live in front of them, working through the technical and fundamental analysis behind each position as it went on
• Wrote the company's sales book — internal, chapter by chapter — so the method could be run by people who had never met him
• Travelled to teach it at other offices
• Sat in with the dealing desk and learned how the product actually works from the people pricing it, which is where the trading-domain knowledge behind everything since comes from
• Sales management and business development across two further financial-services firms before moving into marketing

Across the group and client work

The continuous strand underneath everything else: identity, campaign systems and the digital strategy around them.

• Identity systems across brokerage, prop trading, payments, broker technology, education and review brands
• Campaign systems including a market-entry campaign with an isometric illustration set and a twelve-icon system
• Award badge programmes, exhibition builds and full collateral systems
• Digital strategy, SEO, CRM, email infrastructure, conversion and funnel work alongside the design
• Co-founded and ran a graphic design studio for two years, taking client brands end to end, while working the trading floor by day

BA (Hons) Graphic Design (2006–2009) · MA Graphic Design Communication (2009–2010)

Graphic design · Visual communication · Branding · Typography · User experience · Strategic design

Across the Adobe suite, including Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Acrobat