# James Varga > I help leadership teams put AI to work. I'm an AI Operating Partner for CEOs of UK businesses with 50 to 250 people. I join the leadership team, get AI doing proper work, then stay close once it's running (https://jamesvarga.com/ai-operating-partner). Canadian in Edinburgh, and a serial founder and operator. 30+ years pattern-matching across fintech, open banking, climate, identity, and AI. Dyslexic and neurodivergent — a fact, and an advantage. ## About James Varga is an AI Operating Partner for CEOs of UK businesses with 50 to 250 people, and a serial founder and operator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He also takes a small number of board, angel and mentoring roles each year. His work sits in regulated, technically-hard markets — fintech, identity, open banking, climate, AI — with a through-line of first-principles thinking, pattern-matching across industries, and operator depth. - **Canadian in Edinburgh since the '90s** - **Dyslexic and neurodivergent** — thinks laterally from first principles - **30+ years operator experience** - **5 core industries:** fintech, open banking, identity, climate, AI - **4 industry bodies co-founded:** FDATA, Open Banking Excellence, Innovate Finance, Business AI Alliance (founding member) - **60+ articles, papers, and talks** - **US Patent 8332322B2** — Digital Primary Identity Validation - **Awards:** Scottish Financial Technology Awards 2023 — Evangelist of the Year + Special Recognition; Scottish Financial Technology Awards 2022 — Open Finance & International Achievement; KPMG / AWI "50 Best Fintech Innovators" (2014) - **Formal roles:** DBT Export Champion · Estonian e-Resident Envoy · FinTech Champion for Scotland · SDI Fintech Envoy ## How I help Most of my time goes to one offer, with a small number of lighter roles each year. ### AI Operating Partner (the main one) An AI Operating Partner is a senior operator who joins your leadership team for a set period, gets AI doing real work in your business, then stays close to keep it running. I've spent 30 years founding and running businesses, seven of them my own, so I know what it's like in your seat when the plan isn't working. These days I run my own businesses on AI. I help CEOs of UK companies with 50 to 250 people do the same: I join the leadership team for the hands-on part and stay close once it's running. Advisers, fractional Chief AI Officers included, tend to leave you with a plan and agencies with a set of tools; I work alongside your leaders until the first things are built in your own accounts, then keep looking after them. My point of view: AI should make your people more capable. If the plan is headcount elimination, I'm not the right fit. **What's usually missing.** The tools get better every few months whatever you do, so they're rarely what's holding a business back. What makes a business different is what it knows, like how it prices a job or why it lost the last big contract, and most of that sits in a few people's heads and inboxes where AI can't reach it. The businesses getting somewhere put that knowledge in one place AI can use, which I call a company brain. It belongs to the business and lives in its own accounts, so it keeps its value as the tools change. It also has to start with the leadership team: people take their lead from their own boss, so AI only spreads where each leader is using it in their own work. A single new hire, however good, can't carry that alone, which is why I work with the whole leadership team. **Done on my own business first.** I set up a company brain and a set of AI agents for my own ecommerce brand. The team works with the agents through the task tool they already use, and what the agents learn feeds back into the brain. About two weeks to set up, and at least twice the output from the same team. What I learned is that agents are only as good as what they know. A year from now you'll have: a plan your leadership team agreed, with the cost and payback of each piece; every leader using AI in their own work and your own people running it day to day; a company brain that belongs to you, so AI works from what your business knows; and results measured against where you started, on the business measures we agreed at the outset, so you can show what the work returned. Three stages, each agreed on its own, with the full cost known before you commit. You can stop after Understand, or after the first month of Get it working. About four and a half months in, the first things from the plan are doing real work every day, run by the client's own people, each measured against where they started; because they draw on the company brain, the next thing is quicker to build than the first. - **Understand** (4 to 6 weeks, fixed fee). We find out how your business really works and agree what's worth doing first. You get AI working on your own job inside the first fortnight. Available on its own. - **Get it working** (3 months, about 2 days a week on site). I'm on site one day a week, and someone from my team is there a second day, doing much of the building. The first things go live in your own accounts with named owners, every leader starts using AI in their week, and you get a plain AI policy and approved tools. A check-in after month one, and you can stop there. - **Keep it running** (monthly, at three levels: Light touch, Core and Board level). Light touch is an hour with the CEO each month; Core adds a monthly session with the leadership team; at Board level I also sit in on the monthly leadership meeting and join part of one board meeting a quarter as an invited adviser. A short monthly note, a quarterly review you can take to your board, and a seat at the CEO roundtable. Six month minimum, then rolling with 30 days' notice. It's a fit if AI pilots haven't moved the numbers, your team all use ChatGPT differently, your leaders are at very different stages, or a consultancy programme and a full-time Head of AI both feel like too much. It isn't a fit if you want a large custom software build, you're after a report to put on a shelf, or nobody on the leadership team can give it time. How I work: I take on just a few companies at a time, so I can work closely as part of your team. You work with me directly and I'm your one point of contact; anyone else I bring in is part of my team, working under my lead and under the same confidentiality terms. Everything is built in your own accounts, so your data and what we build stay yours. I'll sign an NDA before we start. Background: 30 years founding and running businesses, seven of them my own. DirectID, founded and scaled globally to around 60 people, raising more than £30m. Co-chaired the data sub-group of the UK's Open Banking Working Group. Helped set up Innovate Finance and FinTech Scotland. Founding partner of the Business AI Alliance. Full details: https://jamesvarga.com/ai-operating-partner ### The lighter ways - **Advisor** — hands-on, strategic. Short engagements or fractional CxO retainers. - **Board** — chair, non-executive, or observer seats where operator depth and independent thinking are what's wanted. - **Angel** — personal cheques in early-stage companies, usually in fintech, regulated markets, or founder teams I've worked with before. - **Mentor** — selected programmes, accelerators, and direct founder-to-founder relationships. What I bring: three decades of operator experience across five industries; first-principles, lateral thinking; a skin-in-the-game bias (I still build); operator energy, not just slides. Pullquote: *"Working with you is dreamy."* — a founder, recently. ## Currently ### Closing Foundry — Founding Partner A GTM system for B2B founders in regulated markets. Three phases — Design, Enable, Run — for seed-to-Series-A teams stuck in long sales cycles, low conversion, or unpredictable forecasts. Embedded, not advisory. Design: diagnostic sprint, sales-readiness audit, GTM architecture (5 Days to Scale). Enable: 30-day bootcamp, playbooks, CRM, RevOps. Run: 90-day or 6-month embedded engagement. Outcomes: +40% win rate · −27% sales cycle · forecast accuracy within 10%. Website: https://closingfoundry.com · Email: hello@closingfoundry.com · LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/closingfoundry ### H2C — Chief Growth Officer The world's first market for Green Hydrogen Certificates. Registry and marketplace letting shipping companies, fuel producers, and cargo owners trade the environmental attributes of green hydrogen independently from the physical fuel. Launched from Edinburgh in October 2024. 96% of green hydrogen projects are stuck pre-construction; Green Premium Certificates uncouple environmental attributes from the physical fuel — giving producers revenue visibility, and letting buyers decarbonise Scope 1–3 with traceability. Ambition: remove one gigatonne of carbon from the environment. Partners: Lloyd's Register, Heriot-Watt University. Website: https://h2c.org · Email: info@h2c.org ### First Carbon Investments — Chief Growth Officer Catalytic financing for low-carbon fuels, transport, and heavy industries. Carbon credit accreditation services and streaming finance. Parent of H2C. Website: https://www.first-carbon.com ### Wildfire Gin — Chief Expedition Officer and co-founder Scottish small-batch craft gin built around exploration. Limited-edition adventures, each rooted in a place, a route, or a moment. Range: Madge Wildfire (juniper-forward); Merchant's Flame (blood orange, long pepper); Wildfire Ascent (pine, citrus, caraway — 2026); Cromlix Hotel collaboration. Trades under Dhu Brew Ltd. Best New Product and three more nominations at the Scottish Gin Awards 2025. Website: https://wildfiregin.com · Email: info@wildfiregin.com ### GoLLM — Chair Agentic AI for feedback insights. ## Previously ### DirectID — Founder & CEO, 2010–2024 Built open banking before the regulators named it. Took the company through four identities (miiCard → The ID Co. → DirectID → Atto). Global credit-risk platform: 13,000+ bank connections across 45 countries; reach to over 1.5 billion people; UK's first open-banking app under PSD2; standards work to shape the regulation itself. €9M Series A led by IKEA's Ingka Investments. 170+ enterprise clients including Prosper, Marlette, and Amigo. Lenders across UK/EU/US. ### Money Dashboard — COO / Co-founder, 2008–2011 UK's leading personal finance management tool. ### Earlier Ambergreen (Director, 2008, search agency); lightershade (Managing Director, 2006–2008, digital agency); beblu (CEO & Founder, 2004–2006, living-room mini-PC hardware); c2sky Services (Technical Director & Founder, 2003–2005); Squarepeg (Technical Director & Founder, 2001–2003). ## Through-line Same cognition, different problems. First principles, lateral pattern-matching, operator depth. Different industries, different problems, one way of seeing them. Where I'm useful: regulated, risk-averse buyers; long sales cycles; technically-hard products; first-mover positions; category creation. The lens: trust is the product; value sits in the market infrastructure that makes trade possible, not in the transaction. The rules: pain first; global from day one; commercial traction beats product polish; tell the truth about the runway. ## Four rules I'd defend in any room 1. **Revenue is the only evidence of product-market fit.** Not signups, not waitlists, not intent. Money changing hands, over and over, from the same kind of buyer. 2. **Go deep into the space you're solving for.** Founders who dabble across domains get outbuilt by founders who live inside one. Open banking took thirteen years at DirectID. Green hydrogen will take ten at H2C. The time is the cost of the credibility. 3. **Sell through your early customers.** The first ten buyers are worth more as references than as revenue. Their word of mouth closes the next fifty. 4. **Record the metrics early.** Before you have the numbers to optimise, you need the numbers to remember. ## Projects (the infinite game) Things I make outside the companies. Sinek's infinite mindset, borrowing from James Carse's *Finite and Infinite Games* (1986) — the work isn't just to build companies, it's to help others build theirs. - **Building Scotland** (https://buildingscotland.net) — Structured interviews across the Scotland founder ecosystem; weekly Substack at https://buildingscotland.substack.com. - **Lessons of a Fintech** (https://www.fintechscotland.com/research-innovation/the-finance-and-health-lab/fhl-innovation-stimulation-open-call/lessons-of-fintech-founders/) — Six-episode video series hosted by Fintech Scotland's Finance & Health Lab. Founder operating system, positioning, product, messaging, distribution, enterprise sales. Plus a companion GPT trained on the full curriculum. - **Business AI Alliance** (https://businessaialliance.org/) — Founding member. UK not-for-profit advocating SME voices in AI policy, publishing white papers, connecting members for practical adoption. Tagline: "Empowering SMEs to propel the UK's AI driven economic growth." - **Wildcast** (https://wildcast.wildfiregin.com/) — Free, activity-specific weather tool. Scores every hour for hill walking, sea kayaking, fishing, or wild camping. The Good Time Score tells you when to head out. - **Beyond the Runway** — Honest conversations about insolvency. - **Co-founded:** FDATA · Open Banking Excellence · Innovate Finance. ## Scotland ecosystem Current and recent seats & affiliations: - **Chair** — GoLLM (agentic AI for feedback insights) - **Board** — Scottish Government Ministerial Trade Board - **Industry Advisory Board** — University of Edinburgh Financial Services & Fintech - **SME Advisory Board** — FinTech Scotland - **Advisor** — TechPassport · SHIFT Open Finance Community · Ingenii Capital · SustainableFinance.Live - **Founding member** — FDATA · Open Banking Excellence · Innovate Finance · Business AI Alliance - **Formal roles** — DBT Export Champion · Estonian e-Resident Envoy · FinTech Champion for Scotland - **Host** — Beyond the Runway · Open Banking Excellence (Edinburgh) - Active across Fintech Scotland, Venture Café Edinburgh, X3, SHIFT, SDI & DBT, Tech Export Group, Edinburgh Futures Institute ## Contact First conversations, not calendar invites. I'm most useful early — before you've decided the answer. Send context: where you are, what's stuck, what you've tried, what kind of engagement you're considering (advisor, board, angel, mentor, just a conversation). The calendar comes later. - Email: james@jamesvarga.com - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jvarga - Wiki: https://wiki.jamesvarga.com - Substack: https://buildingscotland.substack.com - Medium: https://jamesvarga.medium.com - Based: Edinburgh, Scotland ## Resources - [AI Operating Partner](https://jamesvarga.com/ai-operating-partner): the main offer, in full - [Profile](https://jamesvarga.com/): interactive business card (this site) - [Wiki](https://wiki.jamesvarga.com/): structured reference library of frameworks, projects, and proof points - [Building Scotland](https://buildingscotland.substack.com/): weekly newsletter - [Lessons of a Fintech](https://www.fintechscotland.com/research-innovation/the-finance-and-health-lab/fhl-innovation-stimulation-open-call/lessons-of-fintech-founders/): six-episode video series + companion GPT