The thinking behind Compliance Rewired started long before it had a name.

In 2016, my career took a turn that would shape the way I think about regulation today. After training and practising as a lawyer, I began working independently with businesses of different sizes, industries and stages of growth. Europe was also preparing for one of the most significant changes in data protection in decades: the GDPR.

Privacy became an increasingly important part of my work. I advised businesses on data protection requirements, reviewed digital operations and helped identify the changes needed to align them with the emerging regulatory environment. What fascinated me went beyond interpreting the regulation. I became increasingly interested in what happened afterwards.

A legal requirement can be perfectly clear on paper and remarkably difficult to translate into a real organisation. Different business models create different risks. Requirements interact with different operational realities. Responsibilities sit across teams. What makes perfect sense from a legal perspective can become considerably harder by the time it reaches the people expected to execute it.

That tension between regulation and execution stayed with me.

From interpreting regulation to making it operational.

The environments changed and the challenges grew in scale. My work expanded into international regulatory consulting, monitoring requirements across jurisdictions and conducting compliance audits to understand what organisations were expected to do and how those expectations were reflected in their operations. 

Later, my experience expanded into global corporate Compliance, Privacy Governance and Third-Party Risk Management. This brought a different kind of challenge: supporting central frameworks and policies across an international organisation while coordinating business functions, third parties, controls and stakeholders.

Some of those programmes supported operations spanning more than 120 countries. The challenge was not to know every local regulation. It was to help translate central requirements into ownership, processes, controls and evidence that could be applied consistently, while recognising where local or specialist expertise was needed. This distinction is important: the scale reflects the operational environment in which those frameworks had to function, rather than regulatory expertise in 120 individual jurisdictions. 

Scale taught me something important: complexity is sometimes unavoidable, but unnecessary complexity is a choice.

I have seen how easily compliance can accumulate layers. Another policy. Another spreadsheet. Another approval. Another assessment. Another control. Each addition may be perfectly reasonable in isolation, while collectively creating a system that becomes increasingly difficult to understand, operate and maintain.

And that creates a paradox. The mechanisms intended to manage risk can eventually obscure the risk they were designed to manage.

Why Compliance Rewired?

Compliance Rewired grew out of that observation. It is the evolution of a way of working that began during my years as an independent adviser: understand the requirement, understand the organisation in front of you, and find a way to connect the two that is effective, proportionate and sustainable.

Today I describe that philosophy as Rewiring modern Compliance & Governance.

Rewiring preserves rigour while questioning whether traditional processes are still the most effective way to manage the risk. The answer may be clearer ownership, fewer steps, a better-designed control or the right use of technology to remove repetitive work. Other decisions still depend on experienced human judgment.

The starting point remains the same: What risk are we trying to manage, and what is the simplest defensible way to manage it well?

A perspective shaped across different environments.

My perspective has been shaped by moving between different sides of the regulatory world: legal practice, independent advisory, regulatory consulting and audit, and global corporate environments.

It has also been shaped by working internationally and with organisations of different sizes and levels of maturity. There is rarely a universal answer to a governance problem. A framework can be legally sound and still be poorly suited to the organisation expected to operate it.

That is why I am particularly interested in the space between requirements and operational reality: translating legal, regulatory and policy expectations into ownership, processes, controls and evidence while keeping sight of the business decision and the risk behind them.

In complex organisations, that also means understanding where consistency matters and where local or specialist expertise needs to inform the answer.

My experience has progressively brought that perspective into Privacy, Third-Party Risk Management and Ethics & Compliance. AI Governance is the next intersection I am deliberately developing, building on those foundations as organisations confront a new generation of questions around data, accountability, risk and responsible innovation.

The next regulatory challenge is already here.

Technology has always fascinated me because it expands what organisations can do faster than governance can evolve to manage the risks that come with it. AI makes that tension impossible to ignore.

For me, that is what makes the next chapter so interesting. Privacy, third-party ecosystems, ethics, technology and regulation are increasingly converging in the same business decisions. Treating each one as a separate compliance silo will become harder to sustain.

The opportunity is to design governance that can evolve alongside innovation without becoming another layer of bureaucracy.

That is the purpose behind Compliance Rewired: bringing together a legal and regulatory perspective, operational experience and curiosity about what comes next to make modern Compliance & Governance clearer, more practical and capable of scaling with change.

Because the objective was never to create more compliance.

It is to make compliance work better.

Speaking & Collaboration

I welcome opportunities to contribute as a panelist, moderator or roundtable participant, as well as to collaborate with professional associations and communities.

Through Compliance Rewired, I aim to bring a practical, cross-functional perspective to conversations on Privacy, Third-Party Risk Management, Ethics & Compliance, and their intersection with AI Governance.

My interest lies in exploring how organisations can translate complex regulatory and technological challenges into clearer accountability, more effective controls and better decisions.