Process design is not only my profession. It is how I think.
I am Caitlin Taylor, a contract Remediation & Target Operating Model Design Lead for regulated environments. ACON is my passion project: the governance model and toolkit I built from fifteen years inside J.P. Morgan, Barclays, NAB and Santander — available to license, arriving already built, and moulding to your bank in three weeks.
Bank-side, and proudly so.
Let me be unambiguous: ACON is my delivery practice on the firm’s side of the review. I am not a skilled person, and I am not seeking to become one. The skilled person is the FCA’s independent reviewer; I work for the firm under review — in the delivery of the response, not in advising what it should say. The bank and its advisers own the substance; I own getting it delivered.
The FCA does not endorse consultancies, and the Skilled Person Panel is not my market — by design. My permanent bank-side position is a feature: no independence conflict can ever compromise my work for you.
ON YOUR SIDE
BOUNDARY
The industry builds while it delivers — and calls it agility.
When the Requirement Notice lands, the clock is already running. So almost every firm makes the same call, on the same logic:
Governance, controls and a proper delivery architecture feel like time the programme doesn’t have — so trackers, reporting and processes get assembled mid-flight, iterated under fire, while delivery is already underway.
Controls are seen as weight — the thing that stops a programme pivoting when the skilled person’s focus shifts or new findings land.
Both beliefs feel prudent. Both are expensive. A programme built while delivering has no stable base to pivot from — so every change becomes a firefight. The industry calls the scramble agility. It is the opposite.
Every slipped week is carrying cost, eroded FCA confidence and rising attrition — and the constant replanning is where the weeks go.
Every dancer knows what the industry keeps missing: speed and grace in the turn come from strength and control at the base. A programme is no different — it can only pivot as fast as its foundation is firm. Governance, structure and controls are not what stop a programme pivoting; they are the only things that let it pivot safely. When the comms are prepared, the stakeholders briefed, the change windows locked and every document reading from one golden source, a new finding is absorbed in days — not detonated downstream as weeks of rework.
And the half of the industry belief that is true — that building this takes time a firm under review doesn’t have — is precisely why ACON exists. I don’t ask you to build the foundation. I arrive with it: ready-to-deploy governance, structure, controls and toolkit, moulded to your bank in the first three weeks. That is what Agile Controls means. The name is the method.
Designed and battle-tested on a c.£120m, multi-year Section 166 at a major UK bank — a programme that spent its first two years building while delivering, until the structured model was adopted.
Mobilise once. Then deliver and govern in parallel.
The system is a sequence, and the sequence is the point — the exact inverse of building-while-delivering.
Governance model and delegated authorities, org structure and named owners, comms architecture, and the full planning baseline — requirements locked inside two weeks, the workbook live by week three.
Everything built here feeds the two toolkits: plan and workbook → Delivery; governance, comms and org → PMO. Three weeks that replace two years of building under fire.
The programme runs day to day off the golden-source plan created and locked at mobilisation.
When priorities shift, the plan absorbs the change — it doesn’t restart.
Governance, comms and SOPs kept ahead of the programme — briefed before change lands, refreshed every cycle, never allowed to rot.
Forward maintenance is what makes pivoting cheap.
Every regulated remediation has two jobs — respond to the review, then fix what it finds. On a Section 166 that means three gated phases each; no sign-off, no progress.
Mobilisation
& Fieldwork
Remediation Planning
Mobilisation
Delivery
& Close
What each stage of the system runs on.
Three toolkits, one per stage — pre-built, interconnected, and in their third generation, refined against a live reference programme. Not a promise of templates; a working suite.
What you budget is not what you pay.
Unless it is controlled.
The cost of building-while-delivering never appears on a budget line — it appears as the overrun. Three ways to resource the same 20-month programme:
+ 30–45% typical overrun
+ <10% target overrun (proj.)
before counting avoided overrun.
And the avoided overrun is the bigger number: at £500,000 a month, a “normal” 30% overrun is seven extra months — £3.5m more. That overrun is the price of the two beliefs at the top of this page.
Illustrative projections from published market rates and stated assumptions, not quotations. (proj.) = projection from the research base and the founder’s reference programme.
From regulatory finding to programme closure.
Engagement today is a fixed-term contract with the founder — for remediation and target operating model programmes in regulated environments, the full Section 166 included, or from Stage 2 alone. CV, references and rate card on request; this page accompanies the CV.
Every regulated remediation creates the same six problems — a Section 166 just makes them formal. ACON was built to answer them.
The skilled person’s requests are voluminous — and late or inaccurate responses invite deeper scrutiny. A misstep can turn a review into censure.
ACON runs every RFI, interview and evidence request through SLA-timed workflows with same-day breach alerts and a versioned, golden-source evidence trail.
Management presentations, document production and evidence-marshalling land on a team that still has a bank to run.
ACON’s toolkit does the junior work — personal queues, three-click updates, auto-generated reporting — and its people carry the programme, not your executives.
The average skilled person fee has nearly doubled in three years; complex reviews exceed £3m — and the response usually costs more than the fee.
ACON arrives pre-built, mobilises in three weeks instead of months, and is engineered to close within 10% of budget — live float, breach alerts, freeze windows.
Reviews routinely expand beyond their original remit, and the timetable sits at the regulator’s discretion, not yours.
ACON is built to pivot: one golden source means a scope change made once flows through plan, comms and reporting — no rework cascade, no strategy reset.
Boards must challenge, attest and sign — and nothing corrodes that faster than three audiences reading three different numbers.
ACON feeds the bank, the skilled person and the FCA from one dataset — board pack, dashboard and MI that reconcile because they were never separate.
The FCA expects every finding mapped to actions, owners, milestones and evidence — and reserves its severest interventions for firms that fail to deliver.
ACON runs remediation as a gated stage in the same system — findings-mapped plans, named BAU owners, QA, and signed acceptance. Evidence of delivery, not assertion of it.
Test the thinking before you engage it.
Two working instruments and the full white-paper library — built from the same system this page describes. No fee, and no sales call attached.
Could you answer the ten questions your board should ask in week one? Scored out of ten on screen, honest verdict bands, weakest points named.
TAKE THE BOARD QUIZ →Fifteen statements across the five day-one decision areas. A red/amber/green readiness read-out on screen — and your single biggest exposure named.
SCORE YOUR READINESS →Both illustrated white papers, practitioner insights, the regulatory radar and event invitations — one free registration, every paper first.
ENTER THE LIBRARY →Fifteen years of building order inside banks.
ACON was not designed in a boardroom. Every control in the system was learned on a live programme, under a real regulator, at these institutions. When I meet a problem, I design the process that prevents it recurring — this is the record of where that instinct was built.
BARCLAYS
Designed the phase operating models end to end on a £120m, 13-workstream FCA Section 166 remediation: governance frameworks, programme-wide SOPs, role definitions and the controls around them. 100% of phase submissions passed Skilled Person review first time; validation pass rates rose 50%+; reporting inconsistencies fell 30–40%; 36+ work packages mapped into one integrated tracking system; 150+ PMs and BAs trained; MI presented across 520+ governance meetings and 30,000+ delivery hours.
Defined Target Operating Models, SOWs, vendor governance and delivery controls for implementations across North America and Africa, training 200+ practitioners to a single delivery standard.
Redesigned an end-to-end client intake process covering 250+ clients — the flow, the controls and the handoffs between them.
Designed and delivered target-state operating model change inside a major bank environment — governance, process and the measures that prove it works.
Led the redesign of the global agent bank lifecycle from gap analysis to rollout: a new KYC and Enhanced Due Diligence operating model covering onboarding, due diligence and third party risk management, with SOPs and governance frameworks deployed across jurisdictions.
Available for contract engagements — remediation and target operating model design in regulated environments, Section 166 included. Inside or outside IR35, one month’s notice.
START A CONVERSATION →Meet Caitlin.
ACON has one author. I designed the system on a live programme, I refine it on every engagement, and I am the person you will work with from day one — supported by trusted contracting partners when scale demands it.
CREATOR OF THE ACON SYSTEM
I have spent sixteen years leading FCA-driven remediation and large-scale change in regulated environments — Section 166, Consumer Duty, AML, SMCR, KYC — at J.P. Morgan, Barclays, National Australia Bank, Santander UK and Standard Chartered. Process design and requirements are the discipline that leads every mobilisation. They are also, simply, how I think.
On a c.£120m, three-year Section 166 I designed the operating model the programme ran on: every phase submission passed skilled person review first time, 100% on-time FCA submissions, validation rates up 50%+, 150+ PMs and BAs trained. ACON is that experience, engineered into a system — and I deliver every engagement personally, on contract.
The passion project, alongside the contracting.
ACON lives alongside my contract work, not instead of it. Between engagements I update the methodology based on my experience and lessons learned — always confidentially. I would rather show you a working system than a promised one.
I deliver remediation and target operating model programmes on contract — and ACON comes with me. Templates, workflow model and tooling are refined against real deadlines, real governance and real regulators, trialled and tested only ever with the engagement's permission.
The teaching has already started: a self-paced online course training start-up founders in the operations side of running a business. Next comes a project management course series built on the methodology — and then the book: the principles, the gates, the controls and the lessons, written up properly so the thinking stands on its own.
The toolkit that runs the methodology — Microsoft-native, macro-free, already built — licensed to firms and practitioners who want the system working from day one.
“The templates will not be finished in a boardroom; they are being finished on programmes.”
The next remediation is already in the post — a Requirement Notice, an audit finding, a past business review. Have your bank-side delivery partner’s name ready.