Cores that are decades old
Change on the core is slow, risky, and expensive, and every product initiative eventually lands on it.
Solutions · Financial services
Governed delivery for banking change
Banks and mutuals answer to APRA for operational risk and information security, and to ASIC for conduct. The change work behind those obligations eats the capacity meant for new value. Brain-Stem delivers that change under your own controls, with every decision recorded and traceable, so the work stands up when it is examined.
The work you are measured on
Where banking delivery actually hurts
The pressure to use AI for speed is real. So is the catch: a coding assistant that cannot show its decisions adds to the evidence burden instead of carrying it.
A regulatory backlog that never ends
Regulatory change consumes the capacity meant for new value, and the deadline is the regulator's, not yours.
Every release carries evidence
Risk and compliance gates mean each release needs an audit trail, sign-offs, and evidence before it moves. The controls are non-negotiable. The drag is not.
Knowledge that walks out the door
Contractor-heavy delivery bills by the hour, and what it learned about your organisation rolls off when the contractors do.
When it turns urgent
A CPS 230 review
The standard has been in force since July 2025, and now you have to show it.
Core modernisation
A replacement or decommission program kicking off.
Audit remediation
A finding or an incident, with a program now behind it.
A cost-out mandate
Contractor spend has to fall without output falling with it.
A new CTO
A transformation mandate, a budget, and a clock.
If you are an insurer or a wealth manager, the insurance page is the closer fit.
Your regulatory world
We build against the obligations, not around them
Delivery in financial services is more than code. It is the obligations that sit around the code. These are the ones we design for, whichever regulator you answer to.
Basel and DORA
Operational risk and resilience
A delivery platform inside a critical service falls inside your third-party risk assessment. DORA in Europe, the PRA and FCA rules in the UK, and APRA's CPS 230 in Australia all ask the same two things: manage the risk, and evidence the controls. Our delivery records what ran, under which controls, so you can show it.
ISO 27001 and NIST CSF
Information security
Whether you certify against ISO 27001, measure yourself against the NIST framework, or answer to CPS 234, the ask is the same: protect information assets and keep the controls tested and current. Your data sits apart from every other organisation's, and security standards are checked as rules, not left to memory.
MiFID II and SEC 17a-4
Accountability you can show
Conduct and licensing regimes rest on being able to show what happened and why. MiFID II wants records held in a form nobody can quietly alter, and SEC Rule 17a-4 accepts a system that can recreate any record it changed or deleted. Every decision the platform makes is stamped with who made it and when, and nothing is hard-deleted, so the record is there to produce.
GDPR and FATF
Personal data and financial crime
GDPR asks you to demonstrate compliance, not simply claim it, and to keep a record of how personal data is processed. The FATF recommendations behind national anti-money-laundering rules ask for records too, on customers and on transactions. Because every step is traceable, you can answer how data was used and which controls applied, without reconstructing it after the fact.
How control answers it
Your rules, encoded and enforced on every output
CortexOne is the governance and control product. It makes two things true of every piece of work: the decisions are traceable, and your standards are encoded as method, not advice.
Traceability
Every decision joins upOne trace per request
Replayable
A single trace identifier runs through every step of a request, keeping the prompt, the model, the decision, and the result together. Any build replays, and "why did it decide that" is answerable rather than guesswork, which is what an APRA or ASIC reviewer is really asking.
A record nothing deletes
Accountable
Every record is stamped with who made it and when, and nothing is hard-deleted. The audit trail is a by-product of how the work runs, so producing it for a regulator is retrieval, not reconstruction.
Standards and security
Your rules, encodedStandards checked as rules
CPS 234
Your policies and security standards are written as rules the platform checks the work against, not a step someone has to remember. Each output is graded against your approved examples before it ships.
Your data, walled off
Isolation
Your data is walled off from every other organisation, and you set how much work runs automatically with a confidence line: above it work runs, below it stops and hands the decision to a person.
Part of the platform
CortexOne is one of four products working as one
It carries control. MemoryMesh carries compounding, so each engagement starts further ahead than the last. Reflex delivers the work faster and Synapse keeps its cost predictable. For a regulated buyer, control and compounding are what make speed safe to use.
How an engagement works
A shape you can see before you book
You should understand how you would buy before you ever book a briefing. An engagement has a simple shape. The site explains the shape; the briefing prices your work. We tell you what it costs before you have signed anything.
The same shape holds whether you are a department or an enterprise.
1
Fixed-price delivery
A defined project, for a fixed price
We scope a defined piece of work and deliver it for a fixed price. You know what you are getting, and what it costs, before we start. The work runs on the platform, governed by your standards, with every decision recorded.
2
Managed-services retainer
It continues on a monthly retainer
When the project lands, it converts to a managed-services retainer. The platform keeps delivering, maintaining, and improving. Each engagement teaches it more about your organisation, so the next piece of work starts further ahead.
How it fits
It sits above your tools, not instead of them
Brain-Stem runs the delivery layer above the tools you already have. Jira or Azure DevOps keeps tracking the work, and your engineering tools keep building it. The platform coordinates and governs what happens between them.
Adopting it is not a migration. Your teams keep their tools, and your delivery gains a governed layer over the top.
Enterprise readiness
What you can check before you commit
We are early, and we don't dress that up: every claim here is one you can verify in a working session.
Every decision recorded
Each requirement, decision, and output carries a full audit trail on the live platform. Ask to walk through one in a briefing.
Your standards enforced
Policies and standards are encoded as rules and checked on every output. A weak result is rewritten or stopped for a person, never shipped unseen.
A person stays in charge
You set the confidence line. Above it the platform runs on its own; below it, work stops and waits for a person.
Data where you require it
Routing is not tied to one model provider, and processing can run in-country. Where your data is processed is your call, not the vendor's.
The checkable detail behind these four, with what is missing stated by name, is on the security and trust page.
Proof
One engagement, end to end
A safety technology company came to us with a strong product and no settled answer on what to build next. Capability mapping, costed estimates, and customer validation turned that into a decision their board could back. It is not a bank, and we won't pretend otherwise. What carries across is the record: every estimate and every decision traceable back to the evidence behind it, which is what a gated release runs on.
See where your delivery stands
Take the assessment to see how your delivery maturity compares, or book a briefing to talk through a specific piece of work.