Strategic & technical advisory
Intelligence is becoming free. Advantage is moving to position.
We help you find it — and hold it.
AI is the largest opportunity in a generation. It is also the largest source of noise. The organisations that win will not be the ones that adopt the most technology — they will be the ones that hold the right structural position while everyone else optimises the wrong thing.
The ground is shifting under every strategy
For decades, advantage came from capability — knowing more, analysing faster, deciding better than your competitors. Intelligence was scarce, and scarcity was the edge.
AI removes that scarcity. When intelligence becomes a utility — abundant, cheap, available to everyone — capability stops being a differentiator. Advantage flows instead to whatever remains scarce.
Most organisations are optimising the wrong variable, with remarkable efficiency.
Architect or tenant
As this shift plays out, every organisation resolves into one of two roles.
The Architect
Controls structural position. Defines the systems, standards, and dependencies others operate within. Captures value as intelligence flows through positions they own.
The Tenant
Operates inside structures others define. Efficient, capable, often profitable — but renting position from those who built it, on terms they don’t set.
The difference is rarely visible in the financials until it is too late to change. And the window to move from one to the other does not close on linear time — it closes on power-law time.
FindingX exists to help you become — and stay — an architect.
Judgement, applied at three altitudes
FindingX advises boards and investors on structural position in the age of AI — where it comes from, who holds it, and how it is won or lost.
Strategy
Where the leverage actually is for your business — the few positions that matter, separated from the noise of everything that doesn’t. The architect/tenant decision made concrete for your organisation.
Transactions
The moment position is most often won or lost. Technology-intensive M&A, where an acquisition is either an architect move or a tenant trap — and standard diligence rarely tells you which.
Complex transformation
Large change moments where structural position is at stake — platform bets, carve-outs, core system decisions that lock in advantage or surrender it for a decade.
Most strategy houses can’t read the machine. Most technologists can’t see the position.
We do both.
Telling signal from noise in AI requires two things most advisers don’t combine: the strategic frame to see where position lives, and the technical depth to know which claims are real.
FindingX is led by Stephen Stanton-Downes. His career spans Managing Director at Accenture — one of the world’s most respected technology strategy and transformation practices — and UK Head of Financial Services Technology at KPMG, across two decades of technology strategy, M&A, and the platforms capital markets run on. He is a Freeman of the City of London for services to technology, and the author of the forthcoming Who Controls What When Intelligence Is Free.
Particular strength in financial services and regulated technology.
We work at decision pace, not programme pace
Conviction, not documentation
Short, focused engagements that produce a clear view you can act on — not a programme that runs for quarters.
AI-native methods
The tools that let a small team see further and deeper than a large one could — applied to the question, not for show.
The finding, not the framework
Clarity about where to move — not a deck you have to interpret. The aim is the finding itself.
X marks the point of greatest leverage. Finding it is the entire job.
The people who carry the consequences
FindingX works with those who own the outcome of these decisions.
Boards & chief executives
Setting direction in a shifting landscape.
Private equity & growth investors
Assessing technology-led value.
Founders & corporate development
At transaction moments.
We take few engagements and commit fully to each.