Forward deployed engineering for financial institutions
We deploy engineers, and the agents they build, inside your institution.
FwdEngine embeds forward-based delivery teams into banks, insurers and asset managers to design, ship and operate agentic AI systems in production. No pilots that die in committee. No vendor black boxes.
> run.trace — every step recorded, append-only
System
- 142agents active
- 5delivery hubs live
- 3core banking integrations live
- 27evaluation suites green
- 61human approval gates armed
- 5time zones staffed
01Why this does not ship today
Institutions are not slow at AI. They are slow at deploying software into regulated infrastructure.
And AI is software. The constraint is almost never model capability. Four things stop the work, and all four are engineering and governance problems with known shapes.
The data is where nobody is allowed to go
The answer lives in a core platform on a release cadence measured in quarters, behind a change board that meets fortnightly. Every proposal requiring a core change dies there. The proposals that survive are the ones that never needed one.
Compliance is treated as a final gate
A model risk review at the end of a build is an autopsy. By then the architecture has already decided whether per-decision reasoning can be produced, and it usually cannot. The control design has to come before the first line of code, not after the demo.
Vendor-shaped solutions meet bank-shaped problems
The platform was built for a generic institution. Yours has forty years of accumulated specificity: exception handling nobody documented, a policy manual that contradicts itself in two places, and an operator who knows which of the two is enforced. Generic software cannot absorb that. Engineers sitting in the room can.
The pilot was never allowed to become production
It ran on extracted data, in an isolated sandbox, against a use case chosen for demonstrability rather than value. It worked. It was also structurally incapable of promotion, because nothing about it touched the controls, the auth model or the audit estate it would need to satisfy.
02The FDE Model
A pod lands inside your estate and starts shipping in week two.
Forward deployed engineering is a delivery structure, not a job title. Three to five engineers, embedded, with the authority to build and the obligation to ship on a weekly cadence against your real systems.
The pod works in your stack, not next to it
Access, network path and isolation boundary are signed off in week one. Nothing is built against an extract that will later need porting.
Humans and agents are on the same pod
An FDE writes the harness, the agent runs the volume, and the engineer who built it is the one paged when it misbehaves. There is no handover to an operations vendor.
Weekly ship cadence, in your environment
Every week produces something a client engineer can run. If a week produces only a document, the week failed.
The control boundary is written before the code
What an agent may read, what it may propose and what it may never decide is agreed with risk and security before the first build, because it determines the architecture.
03Agentic computation layer
Six stages, an explicit state machine, and a gate that a machine cannot open.
Agents here are stateless functions with a prompt and a schema. What runs next is decided by infrastructure you can read, not by a model reasoning its way through a framework at runtime.
Planning agents
Decompose a request into a typed task graph against the tools that actually exist in your estate, and refuse the ones that do not.
- Task decomposition bounded by a declared tool manifest, not open-ended autonomy
- Every plan is a serialisable graph, inspectable before a single tool call fires
- Cost and latency budgets attached at plan time and enforced at execution
- Replans on failure are capped and logged; there is no unbounded retry loop
04Global delivery
Follow the sun, with the handoff written down.
Agents run continuously. Humans do not. The engineering problem is the handoff: what the incoming region needs to know, what is mid-flight, and which gate is still waiting on an approver who has gone home.
Hub coverage, live
5 active · 2 planned
Each hub owns a shift, not a ticket queue. The outgoing lead writes the state of every in-flight run before the incoming lead picks it up, and an unacknowledged handoff blocks the shift change rather than rolling silently into the next region.
How the handoff works05Where agents earn their place
Seven places agentic systems pay for themselves in regulated finance.
Each of these states a mechanism and the control that makes it deployable. None of them ends with an agent holding a decision right.
- 01
Underwriting copilot
Credit
Assembles the submission, bureau file, financials and the institution's own credit policy into a single evidence set, then drafts the credit memo with every assertion line-linked to the source page it came from.
ControlThe agent never sets a decision flag. It produces a recommendation and an evidence trail; the credit officer signs.
- 02
AML and fraud alert triage
Financial crime
Reads the alert, pulls counterparty history, sanctions hits and prior SAR narratives, and writes a disposition draft that names the typology it matched and the transactions that support it.
ControlEscalation thresholds stay in the rules engine. The agent reorders the queue and drafts the narrative; it cannot close an alert.
- 03
Reconciliation and break resolution
Operations
Matches ledger to custodian and counterparty statements, clusters unmatched breaks by probable root cause, and proposes the journal entry with the supporting lines attached.
ControlProposed entries land in the ERP as drafts against a service account with post rights withheld.
- 04
Client service orchestration
Servicing
Routes an inbound request across retrieval over product terms, a core banking read, and a drafting step, then hands the agent's draft plus its citations to the relationship manager.
ControlRegulated communications route through the existing supervision and archival stack before a client ever sees them.
- 05
Regulatory report assembly
Regulatory
Pulls each schedule from system of record, reconciles it against the prior filing, drafts the variance commentary, and flags every figure whose lineage it could not resolve rather than estimating it.
ControlUnresolved lineage blocks the draft. The agent surfaces the gap; it does not fill it.
- 06
Treasury and liquidity monitoring
Treasury
Watches intraday positions against limits, reconstructs the drivers behind a projected breach, and pages the desk with the exposure decomposition already written.
ControlRead-only against position systems. Alerting is the output; no agent holds execution rights.
- 07
Portfolio research copilot
Research
Runs retrieval across filings, transcripts, internal notes and market data, then returns a thesis brief where each claim carries a citation and a timestamp for when the source was last read.
ControlResearch and trading corpora stay in separate isolation cells. Information-barrier policy is enforced at the retrieval layer, not in the prompt.
06Proof
Four numbers, and what each one is measured against.
A figure without a stated basis is not evidence, it is decoration. Each of these carries the definition a diligence team would ask for anyway.
- Time to first agent in production
- 0days
Median calendar days from engagement kickoff to a first agent serving traffic behind a human-approval gate, across completed engagements.
- Engineer-to-agent leverage
- 0.0agents / FDE
Mean count of production agents under active operation per forward deployed engineer, measured at engagement handover.
- Orchestrator uptime
- 0.00%
Trailing twelve-month availability of the control plane, measured against the SLA definition in the master services agreement.
- Control evidence pass rate
- 0%
Share of client internal-audit and model-risk reviews cleared without a remediation finding attributable to FwdEngine-delivered systems.
07How engagements work
Embed, build, ship, operate. Sixteen weeks to production, then a real decision about who runs it.
Handover is a first-class ending, not a failure to renew. If your engineers hold the repository, the harnesses and the runbooks, and we have watched them run an incident, the engagement worked.
- 01Week 0 to 2
Embed
A pod lands inside your estate, not beside it. We take read access to the systems the work actually touches, sit with the operators whose queue we are changing, and write down the control boundary before we write code.
- Named pod: lead FDE, platform engineer, domain engineer
- Access, isolation cell and network path signed off by your security team
- Control boundary memo: what an agent may read, propose and never decide
- Baseline measurement of the process we are about to change
- 02Week 2 to 8
Build
Weekly ship cadence against your environment. Every agent gets an evaluation suite before it gets a user, and the suite is written from your own historical cases, not a public benchmark.
- Evaluation harness seeded with your adjudicated historical cases
- Agent graph running in your non-production environment
- Human approval gates wired to the roles that hold the authority today
- Audit schema emitting to your existing log estate
- 03Week 8 to 16
Ship
Production behind a gate, on a slice of real volume, with the rollback path tested before the first live request. Model risk and internal audit review the evidence pack we have been generating since week two, not a retrospective write-up.
- Production deployment on a bounded traffic slice
- Model risk evidence pack assembled from live run data
- Tested rollback and kill path with measured recovery time
- Operator training run by the engineers who built the system
- 04Ongoing, or handover
Operate
We run it, or we hand it over. Both are real endings. Handover means your engineers hold the repository, the evaluation suites and the runbooks, and we have watched them run an incident before we leave.
- Continuous evaluation against drift, with regression gates on model upgrades
- Follow-the-sun on-call across delivery hubs
- Quarterly control attestation in the format your auditor accepts
- Handover: repository, harnesses, runbooks, and a supervised incident
08Careers
We hire the engineers who can sit in front of a Head of Risk on Tuesday and ship the change on Thursday.
That combination is rarer than either half. The failure mode we screen hardest against is the engineer who is brilliant in a repository and silent in a room.
Currently hiring
Lead Forward Deployed Engineer
New York · London
Agent Platform Engineer
Bengaluru · London · Remote (UTC-1 to UTC+6)
Evaluation Engineer
London · Bengaluru
Domain Engineer, Financial Crime
London · Singapore
The pilot is not the hard part. Getting it into production, under supervision, is.
Tell us the institution, the constraint and the deadline. If the work is not a fit, we will say so in the first conversation rather than the third.