About
The pressure to move faster will only grow. So will the cost of getting it wrong.
Every decision between speed and trust now carries risks few teams have faced before: AI-built software, machine-speed threats, markets that never close, and providers you can't fully see. We help financial institutions make those decisions with the experience of having made them.
How we work
Operators, not observers
The person across the table has built and run trading, clearing, custody, cloud and AI platforms under regulatory scrutiny. You get judgment from experience, not frameworks from a slide.
One accountable person
Every recommendation has a named owner who will stand behind it with your board and your examiners. AI speeds up the research. It never makes the call, and we use it only where you allow.
Evidence over assurances
We look past the sales materials: researching a provider's track record, reviewing the documentation behind its claims, and going deep with its teams when the decision calls for it. The focus is what matters under strain: how it fails, how it recovers and how you would leave.
Alongside your team
We work with your technology, operations and risk leaders, not around them. Findings are about platforms and providers, never people, and your team sees them first.
Independent by rule
No referral fees, success fees, sponsorships or paid placements, ever. We never advise both sides of the same decision, and we disclose any relevant provider relationship before we start.
Decisions, not decks
Every engagement ends in a clear recommendation, and we help you carry it through to a decision with your board, your risk committee and your examiners.
Who you'll work with
Dan Gicklhorn is the founder and principal of Hawser Risk Partners. He helps financial institutions make the platform and provider decisions that set how fast they can grow, and how far their clients will trust them.
Dan has spent his career building and running the platforms other businesses depend on. He knows how those platforms are designed, sold and operated, and what keeps them standing when it matters most.
At Microsoft Azure, Dan led products at the front door of the cloud: the global network that carries traffic for Microsoft's own services and for businesses worldwide, built to stay up under attack and authorized at the highest level of the US government's FedRAMP program.
As Chief Platform Officer at Apex Fintech Solutions, a clearing and custody provider to brokerages, advisors and fintechs, Dan led the platform under SEC and FINRA oversight. He made security a source of speed rather than friction, put AI into everyday operations in a form auditors could inspect, and helped bring a new cloud platform to market.
Dan holds an M.Eng. in machine learning from Cornell.