Financial services has a reputation among engineers: it's the place where velocity goes to die. Ask anyone who shipped software at a startup and then took a job at a bank, a broker-dealer or a ratings shop. The pipelines run slower. The approvals multiply. Somewhere in the building, a committee with "advisory" in its name holds veto power over your Tuesday deploy.
I've spent most of the last decade inside that reputation, at Moody's Analytics from 2016 to 2019 and at Edward Jones since 2022. I'm here to defend it.
Partially.
Regulated environments taught me a skill I didn't recognize as a skill until AI-assisted development showed up without it: saying no before the first line of code exists.
The four questions
