Point of view Marc McCarthy, November 2026
Every consultancy has an entry product. For most it is free: the health check, the maturity assessment, the complimentary review. The logic is simple. Give something away, get in the door, sell the real work later.
We launched with one of those. Nobody took it. Not because the offer was bad, but because the people we work with have seen the pattern before. A free review is a sales call with a spreadsheet attached. The operations director who agrees to one knows that the findings will point, by remarkable coincidence, at the thing the consultancy sells. So they decline, politely, and carry on living with the reconciliation that does not quite work.
What people actually want
The conversations we have had over the past two years all come back to the same three questions. Where is the risk sitting right now? What would it cost to fix properly? And if we buy something, which of the fifty tools on the market is built for our problem rather than someone else's?
Those are not questions you can answer in a free hour. They need a day with the team that runs the reconciliations, a look at the real breaks rather than the ones in the slide deck, and the data itself: both sides of the match, from a recent day, with the transformations that happen between the source system and the matched record. That is work, and work is worth paying for.
What one paid day looks like
The Data Diagnostic is one fixed-fee day on site, agreed in advance, no day-rate surprises. Before the day there is a 30-minute call and a one-page checklist of what we need. On the day we sit with the team, walk each reconciliation end to end, read the breaks and trace the data. Two weeks later you receive a written report: how the reconciliations actually run today, where the risk and the cost sit, your requirements written in plain language rather than vendor language, and a shortlist of three or four vendors or fixes with the reasons for each. Then a one-hour readout with both of us.
After that it is your decision. Some clients take the report to selection and design with us. Some fix what we found with their own team. Some put it in a drawer until the budget cycle comes round. All three are fine. The report is yours and it stands on its own.
Why paying for it changes the answer
A fee does two things. It makes the day worth your team's time, because you have bought a result rather than a pitch. And it frees us to say what we see. We do not sell software and we do not implement for a vendor, so there is no product the findings have to lead to. If the right answer is that your current platform is fine and the breaks are a data problem upstream, that is what the report will say.
The regulator expects due diligence on the system that reconciles client money, custody assets and safeguarded funds. A document that explains why you chose what you chose, written by someone with no vendor to defend, is the cheapest piece of that due diligence you will ever buy.
One day. A document. A decision you can defend. That is why we start there.