For the one named person holding SMF16 and SMF17 at an FCA firm under £1bn, quietly doing the work of three.
Get compliance covered without the £150k salary line you can't justify.
Full-time-grade cover for a role you need about a day a week. No recruiter cheque, no employer NI, no three-month vacancy gap.
- $850bn+
- Client AUM under frameworks built
- $700bn
- Single largest mandate, MiFID II across EMEA
- Two decades
- At the regulatory coalface
- Seven regulators
- UK, Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg, Caymans, BVI, Mauritius
You are good at this. That was never the question. The question is how one person was ever supposed to carry two full regimes, the RegData calendar, the board pack, and the entire MLRO wall, alone, and still have time to do the senior thinking the role was built for. That is not a you problem. It is a missing system problem. There has simply never been anything underneath you carrying the weight. Artizan puts a senior operator under your SMF to take the grind off your desk and close the gap between what is documented and what you can actually evidence. You keep the role and the judgement. You walk away owning a control framework, a calendar, and an evidence trail you can run yourself, not a binder that gathers dust.
You are not hiring a head, so there is no salary line, no recruiter cheque, and no three-month vacancy gap if it does not work out. You can switch this on in days and step out on around thirty days' notice, and you keep everything we build either way.
I will not promise you a number of clients or a magic compliance score. The people who promise numbers are usually the ones who took your money and left you the work. So instead of a promise, here is the work, the structure, and the standard I hold it to.
The problem was never that you were not good enough. There was just never a system carrying your standard all the way to the moment the regulator knocks.
How much of your week is the senior judgement you trained for, and how much is just keeping the water out?
You arrive to an inbox that already lost. Overnight the horizon-scanning feeds dropped another consultation and another themed letter you have to read, assess, and translate into "does this hit us." Before ten in the morning you are the whole early-warning system for the firm, the only person who will notice if a rule moved.
The RegData calendar is blinking. A return is due, there is no general provision for extensions, and a slip means an automatic fee and a supervisory flag. The board pack is due in nine days and you have to be the three lines of defence, generate the MI, then stand up and credibly challenge your own board on it.
There is a policy out of date because a rule moved last month. An out-of-date policy is not just stale. Under examination it is positive evidence the firm is not keeping pace. And underneath all of it sits the MLRO wall: the SARs to decide, the alerts to clear, the training deck you still have not built.
You do perhaps a third of what the role actually needs, and it still never feels like enough.
Here is the part you say to no one. You have the policies. You are quietly terrified that if someone said "show me it is working" tomorrow, you could not pull the proof fast enough. Not because you are not good. Because there has never been time to build the trail while you were busy keeping the firm afloat.
That is the secret shame, and it is a lie the missing system tells you. You are not behind because you are not capable. You are behind because one set of hands was asked to do the work of three, and no number of late nights closes that gap. The maths was never going to work, and it was never your fault that it did not.
And your name is the one on the Register. Not the firm's. Yours. When the knock comes, you are the one who answers it, alone, with your job, your reputation, and your liberty sitting behind the answer. When you take a holiday, the function takes a holiday too. When you are ill, it stops. The entire control function of the firm is one tired person, and right now that person is you.
£145k–£175k
The first-year cost of a full-time head, for a role you need about ten hours a week.
Up to 5 years
The personal liability one tired name carries, under POCA, if systemic failures land.
0 months
How long the function keeps running when your one person is on holiday.
Doing nothing has a price, and you are already paying it. You pay it in the hours you will not get back, in the board challenge you are too buried to give, and in the slow erosion of being the named person who knows, every single day, that the proof is not yet there. The cost of staying stuck is not a fine. It is the certainty that you are carrying a risk that was never yours alone to carry, and carrying it after hours, unpaid, hoping the knock does not come this quarter.
The Tuesday where compliance is finally just one part of your week.
It is a Tuesday. A consultation lands in the feed and you read it once, because the reading and the first impact assessment are already handled before it reaches you. You decide what it means for the firm. You do not spend the afternoon building the summary.
The RegData return goes out on time. You did not stay late to file it, because the calendar, the inputs, and the checks were carried under your sign-off, not on your shoulders. No automatic fee. No flag. No 11pm.
The board pack is ready two days early. You spend those two days on the challenge, the judgement, the senior read your board actually hired you for, instead of generating the MI yourself at the kitchen table.
Someone asks, in a dry run, "show me the monitoring is working." You open the file. The trail is there, line by line, because the distance from documented to evidenced was closed months before anyone asked. You do not reach for the binder and pray.
You book a fortnight off. You go, and the function does not stop, because it no longer lives entirely in your head. You come back to a running machine, not a backlog that resents you.
And the name on the Register still reads yours, exactly as it should. You kept the role. You kept the judgement. You just stopped being alone with the weight of it. A senior operator who knows your firm is carrying the grind underneath you, and you can pick up the phone to them.
This is the quiet version of what you actually wanted. Not a bigger title. Not a hero quarter. Just a control function that demonstrably works, an evening that is yours, and the calm of knowing that if the knock comes, you can answer it without flinching.
Everything you are quietly thinking, answered straight.
Doubt is healthy. You have been sold to before by people who promised a lot and delivered a deck. So bring the scepticism. Here are the five things you are actually thinking, said plainly, and answered without flinching.
That experience is the exact reason most of this offer exists. You did not buy a report last time. You bought a list of your own problems, professionally formatted, that you then had to action between everything else you already could not finish. This does not work that way. A senior operator does the actual work: the monitoring, the board-pack MI, the regulatory-change tracking, the MLRO casework, under your sign-off and your judgement. Not recommendations about the work. The work. The test is simple. At the end of a review, your desk is fuller. At the end of this, your desk is lighter, and there is a running control framework sitting where the backlog used to be. You have already paid once for advice you had to execute yourself. You should never have to pay for that twice.
Not a report, not a recruiter, not a junior on your budget.
The full-time hire. A six-figure salary line, a recruiter cheque, and a three-to-six-month vacancy gap, for a role you genuinely need about ten hours a week.
Full-time-grade coverage for a fraction, live in days, with no recruiter, no on-costs, and no vacancy gap.
The expensive review. You pay, you receive a report and a list of recommendations, and then you action every line of it yourself, between everything else.
A senior operator does the work and stays through it. You are left with a running framework, not a to-do list with your name on it.
The policy tool or template pack. More policies on paper, which answers "do you have it," not the question the regulator actually asks.
An evidence trail that answers "show me it is working," because that is the only question that gets you fined for the wrong answer.
Carrying it alone, the way you do now. Documented but not evidenced, the function stops when you stop, and the proof is always one quiet fear behind.
Hours lifted off your desk, a function that runs when you are away, and controls evidenced before anyone asks to see them.
A senior operator, not a pyramid.
The person who scopes your work is the person who does it and signs it off. There is no handover to a team of juniors learning on your budget. The person you see on the first call is the one carrying the load on the hundredth day.
Under your SMF, not instead of it.
You keep the role, the judgement, and the accountability, exactly as the rules require. The support sits underneath you. That is the structurally correct way to resource a role the regulator calls more than full-time at a firm too small to fund it full-time.
You keep the machine.
Everything built is yours. The calendar, the control library, the board-ready MI, the evidence trail. If you ever step away from the support, you do not lose the system. You walk away owning it.
This is a senior operator carrying the work under your name. It is not a report you action yourself, a recruiter who places and leaves, or a junior learning the role on your budget.
Four stages, and you keep something real after every one.
We do not start with a sales process. We start by finding the gap, then we close it, then we carry it, then we keep it proven.
- 1
The Map
You keepA clear picture of exactly where you are documented but cannot yet evidence, written down and yours.
We walk every key control and the full RegData calendar against the standard the FCA actually applies, effective and proportionate to your size and risk. We mark the precise places where you have the policy but could not show the control running. That map is the whole game, and most firms have never seen theirs.
- 2
The Build
You keepAn operable control framework: one calendar, one control library, board-ready MI, with ownership and escalation written down.
We build the single compliance calendar and the control library, with clear owners, evidence requirements, and escalation routes. This is the framework you run, not a deck you file. It is designed so the function no longer lives entirely in one head.
- 3
The Carry
You keepAround ten hours a week of grind lifted off your desk, and a function that keeps running when you are away.
A named senior operator takes the heaviest recurring work under your sign-off: monitoring, board-pack MI, regulatory-change tracking, and the MLRO casework wall. You stay the senior head. You stop being the one bailing water at 9pm.
- 4
The Proof
You keepA live, auditable evidence trail, so when the question comes you open a file instead of reaching for a binder.
From here the trail builds itself into your week. Every control that runs leaves evidence behind it. So the day someone asks you to show it working, the answer is already sitting in the file, line by line.
I would rather show you the standard than sell you a story.
I am not going to put a unicorn in front of you. No screenshot of a number that cannot be checked, no testimonial I wrote myself. You have been burned by exactly that kind of thing, and you would be right to not trust it.
So here is what is real, and checkable. The person who builds your framework is the person who stood up MiFID II across a $700bn manager, and who has put more than $850bn of client assets under frameworks he built. This is not a generalist who learned compliance for the pitch. It is institutional rigour, brought to the firms that need it most and can rarely reach it, at a fraction of the cost.
And here is the mechanism, which you can judge on its face. The regulator stopped asking "do you have the policy." It now asks "show me it is working." A scaling firm with policies on paper was fined £21.1m because its controls were not evidenced as working in practice, and 2025 fines hit a record of more than £124m, mostly for that kind of failure. The whole offer is built to close that one gap, the gap that gets firms fined.
$850bn+
Combined client AUM under frameworks Artizan has built.
$700bn
The single largest mandate, MiFID II stood up across EMEA.
Seven regulators
UK, Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg, Caymans, BVI and Mauritius, harmonised under one coherent framework.
We've worked with consultants from a large consultancy who talk a good game but leave you with a PowerPoint and off-the-shelf policy templates. Asad identified the inherent gaps and fixed them. He built a framework that we can run.
“We thought we had MiFID II handled until Asad showed us the gaps. He helped us design the Target Operating Model, draft all the relevant policies and procedures and implemented the necessary systems and controls, on time and under budget.”
“Excellent work from Asad, delivered quickly. Captured our operations precisely and identified valid areas for uplift. Keen to work together to fix the gaps.”
“Asad did an amazing work on our variation of permission application to become a Full-Scope UK AIFM.”
You will never again pay five figures and be left holding the work yourself.
There is no clever cash-back clause here, because the structure itself is the guarantee. The whole thing is built so that the specific way you have been burned before simply cannot happen again. You are not buying a promise. You are buying a shape that protects you by design.
You keep everything we build.
The map, the calendar, the control library, the evidence trail are yours. If you ever step away from the support, you walk out owning the machine, not empty-handed.
You can step out on around thirty days' notice.
No salary line you are locked into, no severance, no morale hit on a team. If it is not earning its place, you end it, and you still keep the framework.
The work leaves done, not handed back.
You will never be sent a list of your own problems to action between everything else. A senior operator does the actual delivery under your sign-off. That is the difference, and it is non-negotiable.
The standard is evidence the regulator would recognise.
The job is not finished when there is a policy. It is finished when you could open the file and show the control running.
The first time someone says “show me the monitoring is working” in a dry run, and you reach for the file instead of your stomach dropping. Or the first Friday at 9pm you spend at home, not at the RegData screen, because the return already went out under your sign-off. That is the moment you feel it working, and most people feel it inside the first few weeks.
The only way you actually lose here is the way you are losing right now. By carrying it alone for another quarter, hoping the knock does not come before you find the time to build the proof. You will not find that time. That is exactly why this exists.
Find the gaps before the FCA does.
Book the free 30-minute call. Bring your scepticism. Leave knowing the one place you are most exposed, whether or not you ever work with me.