A proposal is not yet an action. Something has to permit it.
Ideas are cheap; permission is the constraint. Four years inside a regulated bank made the question concrete — how does an organisation let a good idea become a real transaction without abandoning its controls? ARCANA states the same law formally: reasoning proposes, but bodily constraints, resources, social rules and explicit authorisation jointly decide what becomes action.
Where it shows up
2 positions, earliest first.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence · Citi d10x
Jan 2020 – Apr 2024
Championed rapid prototyping across the studio, halving product development cycles through a reusable code stack and compliant cloud infrastructure — the difficulty being architecture that satisfies a regulated bank's controls without abandoning iteration speed.
Identified and analysed green-field Metaverse and Sustainability opportunities for Citi APAC; formulated the disruptive innovation thesis and advised leadership on where to place strategic bets.
Took 7 nascent products through validation with business heads across the organisation, building value propositions against each unit's priorities to secure executive sponsorship.
Supported the launch of cross-business products processing millions of USD per quarter, including novel financial instruments and specialised fintech infrastructure.
Independent Researcher · Relational AI & Cognitive Architecture
2024 – present
ARCANA — Conceived and built a framework for modelling intelligence as relationships and evolving processes rather than isolated objects. The system represents how patterns form, stabilise, change and recur across agents and groups, with every transition reproducible and auditable.
Embodied agency — Developed an architecture in which reasoning proposes possibilities but cannot act alone: bodily constraints, resources, care, social rules and explicit authorisation jointly determine what becomes action. Private internal state remains separate from public consequence.