Biography

Mark Cutting is a senior technology and security executive with over 30 years of experience managing material risk within globally regulated financial services.

Mark Cutting is an elite technology and defensive security executive with three decades of experience managing systemic, high-stakes risk within globally regulated financial corridors. While standard consultants deliver passive advice, Mark enforces absolute operational ownership.

Backed by twenty years of senior command - including an 8-year dual-mandate tenure as both CIO and CISO for a prominent global alternative investment manager-his career is forged in the raw commercial consequences of technical decisions.

Operating as a pure practitioner-led executive, Mark commands the boardroom floor while retaining deep, front line architectural control. He doesn't just analyse "operational drift" - the dangerous delta where superficial activity masks actual risk - he remediates it.

The "Material Risk" Distinction

Mark Cutting has been formally designated as an FCA Material Risk Taker.

This elite designation serves as a formal regulatory acknowledgement of personal accountability, legally reserved for operators whose professional choices exert a material impact on an institution's risk profile and institutional valuation.

Engaging Mark means deploying an executive explicitly trusted by international regulators and corporate boards to guarantee that technical infrastructure and defence frameworks flawlessly withstand the most aggressive external supervisory analysis.

The "Unicorn" Duality

Board Strategy meets Engineering Reality.

Mark Cutting permanently collapses the traditional friction point between C-suite objectives and complex engineering realities. He ensures that baseline security functions as a highly defensible, value-protecting commercial asset - never an administrative tick-box exercise.

The Boardroom Asset	The Technical Practitioner
Audit Immunity Delivered 8 consecutive, unblemished cycles of SOC 1 and SOC 2 examinations with zero material findings.	Cloud Architecture Directing sprawling, multi-region hybrid estates (AWS/On-Prem) backed by aggressive FinOps cost control.
Regulatory Command Proven executive knowledge navigating strict FCA SYSC, ICARA, DORA, NIST, and ISO 27001 frameworks.	Threat Neutralization Accelerated critical threat detection and response velocities by 50% through deep systemic telemetry integration.
AI Risk Governance Enforcing authoritative, board-level ownership across complex Enterprise AI deployments and data-handling protocols.	Operational Resilience Architecture and execution of fully automated, zero-downtime multi-region data centre switching frameworks.

Core Capabilities

• Clinical Engineering Audits: Mark intervenes in complex technical environments where commercial scale has outpaced operational oversight - rapidly remediating outstanding audit observations through aggressive, senior-led structural remediation.

• Infrastructure Strategy: He directly governed a multi-region global footprint spanning complex AWS VPC architectures, sustaining elite enterprise-grade performance while driving strict cost optimisation across significant infrastructure budgets.

• Defensible Governance: Mark transitions businesses completely out of compliance theatre, hard coding rigorous GRC blueprints designed to actively protect corporate valuation and withstand intense private equity or investor due diligence.

• Emerging Tech Leadership: As an expert operator in Enterprise AI governance, Mark guarantees that corporate "acceptable use" directives are backed by ironclad data handling restrictions and architectural guardrails without integrity compromise.

The "Senior Asset" Engagement

Mark Cutting engineered Phenomlab to explicitly bypass the corporate bloat, hidden markups, and proxy handlers typical of legacy advisory firms. You never pay for account managers or junior associates; you secure direct, unfettered alignment with a veteran executive operator built to stabilise engineering delivery and assume total risk ownership from day one.

Whether your mandate demands a forensic audit of engineering compliance or continuous, high-velocity fractional oversight, Mark Cutting establishes a direct path to operational control with a guaranteed zero-day learning curve.