Beneath the Surface of Financial Services

Part I: Why I Care

I did not grow up understanding money. I did not know how saving worked, what investing meant or why people planned for their financial future as if it were obvious. Sure, I had a piggy bank, but that was the extent of it. The closest thing I had to financial education was watching my dad take the free newspaper instead of buying one because "it all adds up". That line stuck, but it was the only lesson I had.

Working in financial services was not part of any plan. I landed in it by accident. My first job was scanning documents. Nothing special. From there I moved through tasks and teams, slowly exposed to systems, processes, products and problems I did not initially understand. What kept me moving was not ambition, but curiosity. I wanted to know why things worked the way they did, why the same issues kept resurfacing and how all the moving parts fitted together. The more I learned, the more I wanted to understand.

As I moved through different roles, I started seeing financial services from the inside out. Not the polished front ends or the neat messaging, but the machinery underneath. The reconciliations, the dependencies, the operational costs and the fragile parts that nobody notices - until they fail.

The more I learned about the machinery, the more I noticed something else. The products themselves are complicated, not just technically but structurally too. Different wrappers with different rules and tax treatments. Different investments with different risk profiles. Choosing between them requires knowledge most people never receive. The breadth of choice looks empowering if you understand it, but feels like navigating a maze if you don't, even before you get to asset allocation or understanding what any of it means in practice.

Later, with more distance and perspective, I had a different realisation. If it took working inside the industry for me to gain even a basic understanding of how financial products work, what does that mean for everyone else? People who never get that exposure, who are expected to make decisions that affect the rest of their lives without ever being taught how the system works. That question wouldn't let go.

It pushed me further into the infrastructure behind saving and investing. I wanted to understand not just the products, but the mechanics underneath them. And the deeper I went, the clearer it became how much the system shapes people's options long before they get to make a choice.

Most people only see the surface. The apps. The onboarding journeys. The headlines about new features. Once you have seen how the underlying systems work, it becomes clear how much those foundations influence everything that follows.

This is why, even though access looks better on the surface, the fundamentals of financial services have not changed nearly as much as they should. You can invest with a pound now. You can round up spare change. You can open an account in minutes. But the cost to operate, the complexity, the constraints; these quietly determine who gets to participate and who does not.

The cost to run a financial proposition is still high. Good ideas fail because they cannot earn enough revenue to cover operational costs, regulatory burden, legacy systems and the complexity of keeping everything compliant, secure and functioning. I have seen propositions designed to serve lower-income savers collapse, not because the product was wrong, but because the cost of maintaining client records, processing fractional transactions and meeting regulatory requirements made serving smaller accounts unsustainable. This burden is not limited to wealth, either. The same pressures exist in payments, money transfer, lending, insurance, pensions and anything else that relies on money moving safely and reliably.

When the infrastructure underneath is expensive or inflexible, the consequences show up everywhere. If systems are expensive to operate, providers cannot serve everyone sustainably. If onboarding or compliance processes are confusing, people who most need help are the first to drop away. If infrastructure is outdated, propositions are forced to compromise on either personalisation or cost. If education is missing, people start but do not stay, or they make decisions they cannot easily undo.

Financial independence should not depend on whether someone grew up knowing the language of money or whether a business can afford to serve them, and it should not depend on a technical stack that forces trade-offs between quality and cost.

This is why I care about infrastructure. I am not a proposition designer. I am not a behavioural scientist. I am not a financial adviser. I am not someone who builds the customer-facing experiences people fall in love with. My work sits underneath all of that. I focus on the parts nobody sees, the plumbing, the accounting, the tracking, the reconciliation, the controls that prevent things breaking, the networks, the integration points and the internal mechanics that quietly determine what is possible.

This work is rarely glamorous, it does not make headlines, but it shapes everything. It determines whether the ultra-wealthy can manage complex arrangements without friction, whether everyday customers can access affordable, reliable services, and whether new propositions survive, scale or disappear long before they find their audience.

This is also why I am writing this series. I want to examine the touchpoints involved in the storage and movement of money, and understand how improving them can widen access for people who have never been served well by the system. That is the real motivation behind looking beneath the surface.

This series will explore the parts of financial services most people never see but that everyone depends on. Why reconciliation matters. What cost-to-serve actually means. How custody and settlement shape who gets access. The operational realities behind the polished apps. My goal is not to talk about features, but to show why the foundations matter and how improving them can give more people a real chance to participate in a system that affects every part of their lives.

This is why I work in financial services. It is why I am writing this, and it is where this series begins.