The Scottish entrepreneur applying engineering skills to financial services

“I now feel very much part of the whole financial services family,” says the engineer by trade.

Dr Mick O’Connor is the founder and director of Haelo, a Glasgow-based tech firm looking to “transform” regulatory compliance in financial services.

The venture is a player in the mushrooming regulatory tech, or “regtech”, sector, a market that could be worth the equivalent of £63.1 billion globally by 2033, according to a study by Spherical Insights & Consulting.

And the Scottish venture is deploying the likes of artificial intelligence (AI) in its digital twin software-as-a-service, saying its offering empowers senior managers to report in real time that an organisation is running a healthy culture of good conduct across its operations.

O’Connor is seeking to 'revolutionise' how governance, risk, and compliance is done. Picture: John Devlin.

It has also seen its boss O’Connor, an engineer by trade, cross the threshold into the digital world, now seeking to “revolutionise” how governance, risk, and compliance is done.

He feels it’s a big advantage bringing skills from outside financial services into the sector, able to tap into a logical, problem-solving mindset. “I thought the simplest way to do it is find a problem, so what is the problem? Who's got the problem? How big is the problem? And can I solve that problem? And I think if you start as an entrepreneur from those kind of basic principles and premise, you won't go too far wrong.”

Haelo, which is a member of trade bodies such as Scottish Financial Enterprise (SFE) and ScotlandIS, is operating amid an ever-tightening, post-2008 regulatory backdrop.

That includes the introduction in the UK of the Senior Managers and Certification Regime making individuals at organisations including banks, building societies, credit unions, and insurers, more accountable for their conduct and competence. Some executives have been fined hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Haelo is operating amid an ever-tightening, post-2008 regulatory backdrop. Picture: John Devlin.

Haelo, O’Connor says, plugs a gap for a holistic view of an organisation to meet regulatory requirements and show that it is taking reasonable, relevant steps. And now, with executives understandably “twitchy” given that they are on the hook in addition to their employer in the event of an issue, “if you can't demonstrate you've taken reasonable steps, you've [personally] got a problem”.

The businessman had seen first-hand the need for such an offering when working in a management role and being alerted to a potential issue in his team, which saw the firm’s group compliance director examine the division with a finetooth comb, and give it the thumbs-up.

But it made O’Connor realise that while he had information on what was happening in the business, he didn’t understand the picture at ground level. “And I think that applies to any senior executive, in any walk of life.”

That sparked the idea for Haelo. “Then, in 2016, I had the opportunity to start my own company, and it was something I'd always wanted to do. I thought, ‘let's just roll the dice and see where this goes’.” It started out as a consultancy, not a software company. “I could barely spell software [back then],” he says wryly. It had come up with consulting framework called “organisational meshing” that helped its first big client navigate a company-wide transformation.

O’Connor was then asked by the client if Haelo did supporting software, and was told it “would bite [his] arm off” if so, prompting him to seize the opportunity, and working with a coding firm to help on the technical side. He saw every organisation as being subject to regulatory compliance, but financial services seemed like a particularly good fit.

“I had no clue about financial services, I'd never worked in financial services. But I thought, ‘that's probably a good place to start’. And they've really embraced me and really embraced Haelo, so I now feel very much part of that whole financial services family.”

SFE boss Sandy Begbie in May of this year noted that the financial and professional services sector in Scotland “contributes more than any other to the Scottish economy”, buoying it by £14.3bn last year. He also called for more action to overcome regulatory obstacles.

Haelo was the same month announced as one of the winners of a £50,000 FinTech Scotland grant in a “first of its kind” AI compliance cluster-wide challenge. O’Connor now says the capital injection enables him to take Haelo’s functional prototype, and convert it into a minimum viable product by the end of this year, “and then hopefully launch”.

It has been working “hand in glove” with Tesco Bank, and had talks with several players in financial services, including major corporates, and in the next few months will keep doing so and showcase its wares to potential investors – amid Scotland being cited as a leading destination for foreign direct investment.

O’Connor, whose CV also includes serving as programme director at Prestwick Spaceport, in addition sees the potential for Haelo to work in other markets, such as pharma, nuclear, aviation, and health. And while it is initially focused on the UK, he has his eyes on “world domination”, eyeing Singapore, the US, Australia and Europe, for example.

His own journey started by growing up in Greenock, and taking on an apprentice welder post at the Clyde shipyards, having convinced himself that he wasn’t academic. However, his bosses wanted him to go to college one day a week, which proved an “absolute revelation, because it was something that I was then good at”.

He went on to rack up a collection of academic accolades, most notably the Prince Philip Prize, which is awarded annually by the Glasgow Incorporation of Hammermen to the best engineering student in the West of Scotland (“I was more surprised than anybody else”, says O’Connor).

He says it changed his life, and he is now one of those responsible for choosing the winners of such prizes. “And a big part of my role is just putting my hand on young people’s shoulders and pointing them in the right direction – because I know many people did that for me.”