Who you would be working with
About me
I am Valerio, a Senior Product Manager in financial services by day. Outside of that I build the digital side of small businesses: the things that bring money in, and the things that take the admin off their hands.
From the day job
What I have changed
- From over an hour
20 minutes
A client process at Ascot Lloyd, once the manual steps came out of it.
- From four weeks
Instant
Report turnaround, after the reports learned to build themselves.
- From £1M
Over £3M
A product line at Bionic, the UK's largest SME marketplace.
I build on my own because it is quicker and I get more done that way. An agency puts several people and several rounds of decisions between you and the thing you asked for, and you pay for all of it. Here there is one person to brief, one deciding, and one answerable when something breaks. The aim is not to be the cheap option: it is to put more of what you spend into the work itself.
A business tells me what is costing it money or eating its week, and I build the thing that fixes it. I would rather be building than sitting in the meetings that decide what to build, which is most of why the work gets done as fast as it does.
By day I lead digital product at Ascot Lloyd, a top six UK wealth management firm, where my focus is cutting out manual steps through automation and making AI practical inside regulated constraints. Before that I was at Bionic, the UK’s largest SME marketplace, launching products used by tens of thousands of small businesses. That background shapes how I think about AI: not as a novelty but as a practical tool for getting things done.
Background
- Product management
- Nine years in tech, five of them leading digital products in financial services and SME marketplaces, after four in user and market research.
- Building and automation
- Real systems running in production rather than demos: payments, databases, scheduled jobs, and the monitoring that tells me when one of them stops.
- Research background
- MSc Digital Anthropology from UCL. I understand how people use technology, not just how to build it.