“Good evening, Sam, Steph, Ari, and thank you for making time in your crowded schedule, Sir David.” Oscar rolls into his warm-up while Mhari waits at one side of the table, within easy grabbing distance of the laptop and the projector, playing the glamorous assistant to Oscar’s stage magician. “This isn’t a routine report, you’ll be pleased to hear. Five weeks ago one of our theoreticians made a conceptual breakthrough and I decided to put regular work on hold for a week while we explored its potential to revolutionize our operations. I don’t use that word lightly, and I wouldn’t have pulled my entire team off their normal workload if the value proposition represented by the new paradigm wasn’t extreme, with a payback curve that will reach break-even within a single quarter. However, to continue in this new direction I need to confirm that all stakeholders are fully invested. Basically, gentlemen and lady, I need your consent to pivot the Scrum . . .”

Mhari strokes the remote lighting controller that she holds out of sight behind her back. She’s been dimming the meeting room lights slowly since the four senior execs arrived, taking her cue from Oscar. She’s got no idea how he managed to winkle Sir David out of his oak-paneled penthouse nest, but he’s a prize—the Bank’s director of quantitative trading. The others are all lower-level executives, from the head of the London Stock Exchange IT group to the Lord (or rather, Lady) High Executioner of the regulatory compliance team: but they’re all critically important, because any one of them can spike Oscar’s attempt to change his team’s operation remit if they withhold their consent. Furthermore they’re already beginning to look uneasy at what Oscar is telling them.

“. . . We will be able to anticipate major trading strategy shifts among the quant-determined strategies of our rival institutions. This is medium-term stuff—a one to ten day lead—but with this fantastic new algorithmic approach we should be able to consistently anticipate the commodities markets. Ironically, the worst drawback is that it’s so good it’ll look eerily like front-running to an outsider—and we don’t want to lay ourselves open to accusations of malfeasance. So we intend to bulletproof ourselves from a regulatory perspective before we go any further, which is why I invited you all here today—”