Building is cheap now.
Deciding what's right isn't.
I build products for industries where a mistake costs real money: systems, banking, fintech, and now physical commodities.
Each time, the hard part was never the building. It was deciding what was right, checking it, and keeping it right.
Before any of it: a carpentry apprenticeship, walls covered in A4 printouts until the exams were passed, and a council that gave me a job the afternoon I walked in asking for experience.
The full record2001–03 Sun Microsystems
Mission- and life-critical systems, 45 minutes to restore
Health, military, finance, broadcast. Platinum support where the contract cost more than the servers and parts travelled by motorcycle and helicopter. I led one of twelve EMEA teams in year two.
2004 Vodafone
The go-to-market for the UK's first commercial 3G network
Staff training, a nationwide event programme and a demonstration tunnel at football grounds, malls and London landmarks, built across sight, sound and touch. The public's first use of high-speed mobile data.
2008 BBVA
The first Spanish bank with real personal-finance management inside online banking
A €28m programme. Conceived in days, prototyped in a day or two, then scaled across 150 to 200 engineers and designers on three continents.
2010–12 Strands
The PFM banks bought as the first built for them. Finovate three years running
The white-label platform behind deployments at Barclays, ING, BMO, Deutsche Bank, PNB and Banco Sabadell. The consumer version passed 100,000 users and won a 2010 Webby.
2020 National Geographic
SIIA CODiE Award for the learning platform
Brought in to rescue a failing delivery. I rebuilt the design system and we shipped.
2021 Banco Sabadell
Europe's first fully digital bank onboarding, after six years of failed attempts
Called on a Wednesday, in the room on Thursday, live in nine months. Accounts, cards, loans and mortgages, with the Bank of Spain's rules in the room from day one. I ran it, for a year, from a boat in Greece.
2022 FICO
A 10x strategy and four years of transition states, in five weeks
I interviewed the CEO and every manager and sub-manager in the organisation, then designed the strategy and the path to it.
2026 Nelum
The AI assistant for the commodities industry, built by one person with agents
Live since July. The first field test of the Intent Loop.
The Intent Loop
Product design when building is cheap. A method for small AI-native teams.
A small team with good agents can produce a working version of most ideas in an afternoon. What hasn't become cheap is deciding which version is right, checking it is safe, and keeping it right once people depend on it. The Intent Loop is a method built around what is now scarce: clear intent, human judgment, real-user evidence and trust over time.
Every claim sourced and graded.
Is your team ready to let agents build?
Twelve yes-or-no questions across the four bets of the method: intent, evidence, judgment and agents. You get a score, a reading of where your loop breaks, and the chapters to read first.
- 0–3ExposedAgents build faster than anyone checks.
- 4–6FormingPieces exist; the loop doesn't close.
- 7–9LoopingIt runs. Judgment is the limit.
- 10–12CompoundingNext edge: your second user, agents.
Nelum: the AI assistant for the commodities industry
An assistant that knows the physical commodities trade (43 commodities, the law and the research behind them, in English, Chinese and Arabic), built on two things the trade has never had together.
A verification side: KYB on every company, KYC on every person, sanctions and PEP screening, biometric liveness, so you know who you're dealing with. A compliance layer: published intent, a consignment flow from identity to closure, and an audit trail where rewrites are impossible, so you know what was agreed and what happened.
No commission, no success fees. I designed and built it myself, with agents.
A small number of advisory conversations a month, with founders and product leaders building for regulated, high-trust industries. Start with the scorecard; the result tells us both whether a call is worth your time. Then get in touch.
Christopher Barklem. Based in Singapore. Set in Geist. LinkedIn · Nelum · Privacy · © 2026