Two founders, one accountable relationship

I learned risk on a trading floor. Wheat on SAFEX and the Chicago Board of Trade, silos across the maize belt, positions that either held overnight or didn't. The market never cared what any of us believed. Twenty years later I build the systems banks and insurers report on, and it's still the only rule that matters: the number is right or it isn't.

I studied Investment Management at UJ and started out in the markets, trading and then co-ordinating the JSE's Yield-X front-end implementation. That turned into consulting, and consulting turned into eleven years abroad and at home. Banks in Hong Kong, London, Northern Europe and South Africa. Credit models one year, operational risk data quality the next, always with a team around me.

Most of my work happens one layer above the report, in the data architecture and governance that decide whether a reporting programme can be trusted at all. With a four-person team I helped build the enterprise data governance framework for a top-four South African bank. On an integrated finance and risk warehouse I led the business analysis alongside eight analysts drawn from three different organisations. When an entire SAM return had become a black box, we traced it back through every finance and actuarial spreadsheet feeding it until it made sense again. That's the job more often than people admit.

I build as well as advise. RAHN Monitor is my design: FICA-compliant sanctions, PEP and adverse media screening for accountable institutions across SADC, hosted in South Africa, with an audit pack that stands up to the FIC.

None of it was a straight line, and that's the point. I can sit in a steering committee at nine and be in SQL Server by lunch, and I'm useful in both rooms.

I bring governance frameworks that survive contact with implementation, quantitative depth behind the process, and a healthy discomfort with numbers nobody can explain.

If something in your reporting has stopped making sense, I'd like to hear about it.

I learned business in a kitchen. Heat, pressure, no room for excuses, and a plate that either delights someone or doesn't. Twenty years later I run a tech company, and honestly? Same rules apply.

I trained as a chef at the Institute of Culinary Arts, then accepted a Sommelier Scholarship at Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild estate in the UK. Classical training, held to the highest standard.

The eye came next, from years under stylists and photographers like Johan Wilke, freelancing across the magazine industry and learning to spot what's wrong in a frame before anyone else notices. I took that into my own business as a personal stylist for men, then into private cheffing through the seasons in Cape Town and Plettenberg Bay, for CEOs, chairmen, founders and international clients accustomed to being looked after properly. Curation, whether it's a person, a plate or a brand, is always the same question: what does this need, and what does it need taken away? Clients like that teach you fast. You learn to read a room quickly, keep things private, and hold your standard when time is short. Twelve at the table, one service, no second chance to get it right.

Come Wine With Us grew out of that. Six friends around a table, eight years later 4,500 members strong across South Africa, with activations booked two years ahead for clients at Distell. Covid cancelled every one of them overnight. I grieved that business, then I rebuilt. So when an SME owner tells me everything is on the line, I don't nod politely. I know.

Today I'm Co-Founder and COO of RAHN Consolidated, where we build compliance and AI products, optimise the processes underneath them, and run our Agentic AI Internship Programme, putting unemployed graduates to work building commercial AI agents. Every client we serve helps a young South African get a first real shot in tech.

I bring curation that becomes brand, community that becomes pipeline, and a chef's discipline for making many moving parts arrive as one.

Hungry to talk compliance, AI or growth? Pull up a chair.