Our experience

The core of Ascendant Strategy’s value proposition is simple and straightforward – content based skills that have been developed through senior leadership roles inside capital markets organisations. These competencies and capabilities have been tested and battle-hardened across a wide range of internal engagements – be they platform transformations, merger and acquisition integration, regulatory compliance or business model evolution.

As practitioners, having both sponsored and led large-scale, enterprise wide engagements, James and Alastair understand how to get the key things right – matching cost to the required outcome, execution being as important as the implementation itself and how to bring all of your stakeholders (internal and external) with you on your journey. All of this is packaged into Ascendant Strategy’s methodologies and approaches which will help bring you the right result, in the right way for your organisation.

Managing Directors

James Maxfield

  • Held MD level positions running operations, middle office and change management within global financial institutions
  • Experienced first-hand the challenges driven by increasing regulation, cost pressure and legacy IT architecture
  • Operated within FCA regulated roles experiencing first hand the governance and oversight requirements relating to infrastructure change
  • Extensive experience with utility offerings, managed service strategies and blending new innovation into legacy architecture

Alastair Rutherford

  • Track record of working with C-suite to shape, drive and deliver large-scale ($250m-$500m) transformation programmes across middle and back office areas, spanning products and entities
  • Experienced global leader, having undertaken assignments based in London, New York, Tokyo and Singapore
  • Extensive experience managing large global IT organisations (1500+) in Investment Banking environments, utilising onshore, offshore and vendor delivery models
  • Solid understanding dynamics of IB change, and how to make it work

Our story

As practitioners, our experience combines extensive transformation experience across IT and business, enabling us to provide enterprise wide leadership to support your journey.

  • Combined expertise across capital markets industry covers global roles within diverse range of institutions – we understand the uniqueness of institutional infrastructure
  • MD level experience across a variety of leadership roles – we have sponsored, led and executed on transformation across geographies, asset classes and jurisdictions
  • Delivered successful outcomes against a rapidly changing external environment – we are adept at managing C-suite stakeholders and regulators through this journey
  • Well positioned to balance commercial objectives with institutional concerns – we understand that cost benefits have to be balanced with risk and compliance obligations, it is never ‘either-or’
  • Experienced firsthand the upside and downside of transformational change – we know what success needs to look like to harness innovative technology or third party solutions