AI Architect · Financial Services · London

Hassan Shuman

I design and build production AI systems for regulated financial services — and ship my own.

25+ years across banking and insurance, a research background in biomedical engineering, and a habit of writing the code — not just the strategy. RAG, agentic systems and MLOps on AWS and Azure.

Credentials · verifiable
  • 25+ yrs banking & insurance
  • 3 AI systems live on the web
  • Python · Rust · LangGraph
  • AWS SA + ML Specialty
  • FinOps & Azure certified
  • Open-source reference builds

How I work

I design it. I build it. I ship it.

Three things a client is really buying: the design, the working code, and the judgement that comes from running my own AI systems in production.

01 / Architect

Design for regulated reality

Twenty-five years defining enterprise AI, cloud and data platforms for banks, insurers and government. I know what a client's risk, security and audit functions will actually sign off — and design so they do.

02 / Build

Write the production code

Hands-on RAG and multi-agent systems in Python and Rust — FastAPI, LangGraph, vector search, LightGBM, MLOps pipelines — deployed as real, monitored services rather than proofs of concept.

03 / Ship

Run my own systems

Three AI systems I designed and built run on my own infrastructure — live on the web and open on GitHub: cloud-cost intelligence, quantitative ML, and linguistic bias detection.

Selected builds — my own systems

Evidence you can open in a browser

These aren't slideware. Each is a system I architected and wrote end to end, running in production on my own infrastructure. The point of each card is what it proves I can build for a client.

● Live · finopsmind.cloud

FinOpsMind

Agentic cloud cost intelligence

A Claude-powered agent with nine specialised tools that interprets multi-cloud billing and reasons over 56 cost-optimisation rules across AWS, Azure and GCP — then generates Terraform remediation and ranked recommendations. Rust/Axum backend, React 19 front end, PostgreSQL, Redis and a Qdrant vector store for retrieval.

Rust / AxumReact 19QdrantPostgreSQLRedis

Proves: agentic GenAI over a real domain, full-stack product engineering, and RAG retrieval — in my strongest specialism.

● Live · paper portfolio since Mar 2025

Alpha Signal

Quantitative ML trading platform

A Ridge / LightGBM / GRU ensemble with a custom directional-penalty loss, generating signals across 197 assets in equities, FX and crypto, validated with walk-forward backtesting. Built entirely in Rust as systemd microservices over PostgreSQL, exposing a signals API and an agentic reasoning service, tracking a live paper portfolio from a $100k base.

RustLightGBMGRUsystemdPostgreSQL

Proves: a full ML lifecycle in production plus disciplined quantitative validation and deployment.

● Live · perspectiveai.co.uk

Perspective AI

Critical discourse & bias analysis

An LLM-driven engine that analyses framing and bias across sources, combining retrieval over a vector store with structured reasoning to surface the competing narratives inside a body of text.

PythonLLMvector searchRAG

Proves: applied NLP turned into a live product, and Responsible-AI thinking on bias and transparency.

Reference architectures

What I built then. What I'd build now.

For each major engagement, an open architecture write-up and a working reference implementation — the 2026 design, the trade-offs, the measured numbers, and the code on GitHub.

Enterprise AI delivery

Shipped in production, for real banks and insurers

A selection of enterprise work — chosen for relevance to financial-services and insurance AI. The domain knowledge behind these is the part most engineers can't fake.

NatWest — private RAG assistant + mainframe migration
Built a private RAG support assistant for Amazon Connect agents on Bedrock — natural-language search over internal knowledge during live calls, cutting average hold times by 35%. Also advised the commercial-banking mainframe migration to AWS (equivalence testing, CDC).
BankingRAGAWS
MS Amlin — insurance data platform for ML risk modelling
Built a unified data platform integrating 10 acquired companies into Cosmos DB and Databricks, enabling ML-driven risk modelling, and defined a three-year cloud roadmap that stabilised a struggling account.
InsuranceData / MLAzure
Lloyds Bank — real-time ML fraud detection · IBM
Architected a fraud-detection platform processing 2M+ transactions daily in real time, with ensemble ML over a unified data fabric achieving a 40% fraud reduction — all inference kept inside the bank's regulated boundary, no data egress to external APIs.
BankingMLFraud
ASR Insurance — FinOps turnaround · Holland
Rescued a stalled FinOps initiative with live Azure spend analysis, tagging compliance and Terraform-based remediation; a 30% estate reduction delivered a 60% cost reduction and a new FinOps operating model.
InsuranceFinOpsAzure
Deutsche Bank — application rationalisation · IBM
Led a portfolio rationalisation programme reducing 600 on-premise applications to 400 through consolidation and migration to microservices on AKS/AWS, with the TCO business case linking rationalisation directly to cost and operational-risk reduction.
BankingRationalisation
NHS Track & Trace — conversational AI at scale · IBM
Built the MVP Amazon Connect + Salesforce platform that won a £20M competitive bid, with AI-assisted call routing and real-time transcription (Transcribe, Comprehend) processing 50,000+ daily interactions.
Public sectorConversational AI
GCHQ / Government — FinOps centre of excellence · IBM
Designed and deployed an enterprise FinOps strategy and cost-optimisation CoE with Python/boto3 cost-intelligence dashboards, and a classified data architecture built to HMG security standards.
GovernmentFinOpsSecure
Danske Bank — mainframe modernisation
Migrated 5M+ lines of COBOL to AWS with BluAge, achieving full mainframe decommission and £40M+ in annual savings; designed a serverless-first credit-card loyalty platform under a 99.9% SLA.
BankingModernisationAWS

Background

The foundations under the code

An engineering and research foundation, kept current with hands-on ML certification.

BSc
Electrical EngineeringUniversity of Sussex · 1987
2025
AI / ML Professional CertificateUniversity of Michigan
AWS
Solutions Architect · ML SpecialtyAmazon Web Services — certified
Azure
Azure Architecture · FinOps · ITILMicrosoft & FinOps Foundation — certified
Research
Biomedical Engineering (PhD)Mapping the human brain in Down's Syndrome
Domain
Banking · Insurance · Government25+ years of regulated-sector delivery

Contact

Let's talk about your AI delivery.

Available for select AI architecture and engineering contract engagements in financial services. If you need someone who can own the design and write the code, get in touch.