Advisory built from the inside out

Robert founded Oakbridge Agility after a career spent on the inside of the institutions that set the regulatory standard: first as a British Army officer, then across more than two decades in senior governance and risk leadership at two of the world's largest banks.

He most recently served as UK Head of Operations Governance at Citibank, accountable for legal entity governance across UK and European Operations. There he rebuilt the governance reporting framework following a major functional reorganisation and streamlined the department's FCA Senior Managers & Certification (SM&CR) Regime documentation into a form senior managers could genuinely own.

Prior to Citibank, Robert was a Managing Director at Bank of America and Chief Operating Officer for Global Risk Management (International), leading a team supporting the International Chief Risk Officer across EMEA, Asia Pacific and Latin America. As COO across Risk, Compliance and Operational Risk, he led SM&CR and Senior Management Arrangements, Systems and Controls (SYSC) implementation, contributed to the firm's Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Process (ICAAP), coordinated the department's Brexit response to the regulators, and established the conduct risk taskforces that embedded FCA conduct expectations across the region.

His resilience credentials were earned in the field rather than in theory. As Bank of America's Global Business Continuity and Recovery Executive for EMEA, Latin America and Canada, he led a team of fourteen covering thirty locations, delivering contingency planning for the London 2012 Olympics and the 2014 World Cup, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch merger, and the firm's international pandemic planning. He later authored the Risk function's crisis event playbook and led the response to both COVID-19 and the Russia–Ukraine crisis. Every one of those programmes depended on getting a lot of people, in a lot of places, pulling in the same direction under pressure.

The financial services sector has no shortage of large advisory firms. What it lacks, particularly for SMEs and start-ups, is experienced, board-level advisory that is genuinely accessible, proportionate, and delivered by someone who has actually done the job.

Robert founded Oakbridge Agility to close that gap, to help growing businesses build the governance, resilience and regulatory confidence needed to scale, attract investment and navigate change.

The name reflects that philosophy: the oak as a symbol of strength and longevity; the bridge as a commitment to connecting regulatory expectation with practical, operational reality.