Blog Posts

Notes on financial systems, AI, compliance, resilience, automation and the realities of keeping business-critical software working.

Graphic headed “When your system expert is out of office” with the subheading “Key-person risk in financial systems” and the line “If the system only works when one person is here, that’s a business risk.” A city bus shows “OUT OF OFFICE” on its destination sign. At the bus stop, a checklist shows core systems, data and reporting, and compliance ticked, but the system expert box is empty. Faint dashboards in the background cover payments, reconciliations, regulatory reporting and client data. Dark Arts logo and darkarts.it at the bottom.

Key-Person Risk

𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻

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Poster showing the New Zealand coat of arms and heading NZ Privacy Act Amendment, Indirect personal information notification, Effective 1 May 2026, Are you ready?

NZ Privacy Act change, effective 1 May 2026

IPP 3A indirect personal information collection notification requirements may apply if you collect information indirectly, from third parties, other agencies, or external data sources.

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Image showing words in big bold letters saying Same Input, same prompt, different result in smaller letters nothing changed on our side.

Even teams building AI into their products don’t fully trust the outputs inside their systems.

I came across a piece from WorkOS on how they test their AI agents. They built eval datasets, scoring systems, regression checks, and comparison tooling. Because nothing existed to do it for them. That tells you something important. This isn’t just a tooling problem. It’s an infrastructure gap.

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Office building made from computer monitors in front of mountains and a desert with the right part of the building crumbling and the dust / sand blowing in the wind towards the desert

Your AI is getting worse! You just haven't noticed yet.

That’s the problem with systems built on sand. They don’t collapse. They erode.

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Fout images showing a monitor gradually crumbling into sand

Systems Built on Sand

I’ve spent decades building systems that are: 🛠️ deterministic 🔍 testable 🧱 stable over time The kind that run core financial platforms for 20+ years.

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Cartoon showing a man being released by robots because he said please and thank you to an AI chatbot

🤖 Actually manners DO cost something!

Growing up, I was told: “Manners don’t cost anything.” This summer’s big debate: should you use manners with AI? "Doesn't using manners consume the electricity of a city?"

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Image showing a robots hand touching a touch screen with a list on the right and a large green check on the list

🌐 AI agents use websites by pretending to be humans

Booking flights. Submitting forms. Running checks… They take screenshots, guess what buttons do, and fumble through forms. Slow. Fragile. Unreliable.

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image showing blue lit up mother board with a horizontal timer and a black circle on the timer just to the right of the timer start

Another controlled go-live this week 🎉

A provider-mandated integration switch went live across a high-volume screening platform.

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image showing stressed out dude with a very old pc on his right showing doc on the screen and a laptop on his left showing fraphs and figures on the screen

⚡ When Your CRM and Legacy Systems Just Won't Talk…

Your sales team closes a deal in your shiny new CRM. And then? They wait. Because someone in operations has to manually re-key the same data into your legacy processing system.

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Graph showing a large dip near the middle and the question can you prove this data hasn't been tampered with?

💥 Auditors could ask “Can you prove this hasn't been changed?”

And if you can’t prove it, you don’t have compliance — you have risk.

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Illustration of document-workflow costs including version-control chaos, regulatory risk, approval bottlenecks and branding inconsistency

Is Your Document Workflow Costing You Time, Accuracy and Money?

Across financial services, we still see the same pattern: documents created by copying old Word files, assembling content manually from clause libraries and relying on email chains for approvals. Whether it's policies, contracts, statements or regulated customer communications, manual document handling continues to drain hours from already stretched teams.

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image as a poster 3 questions every leader should ask about resilience, could we keep operating if our core systems went offline? How fast could we recover? Do our customers know what to expwct? Tag line Outages happen, resilient businesses survive

💥 Outages Happen. Resilient Businesses Survive

Recently, a major infrastructure outage took big-name apps, payment systems, and online services offline across the world...

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🚨 The Psychology of Cybercrime: Why Businesses Keep Falling for Attacks 🚨

It’s easy to assume that only “careless” people fall victim to phishing or social engineering. The truth?

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Five illustrations depicting validation errors, disconnected systems, manual data entry, untested backups and poor security

🚨 The Hidden Cost of Making Do with Broken Data Systems

Here are some patterns we see that almost always turn into big issues

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red circle with red giant lock in front and red links and dots over

🚨 Cyber Threats 2025: Are You Ready?

The NZSIS 2025 Security Threat Environment Report & KnowBe4 Financial Sector Threats Report are out — and the numbers are staggering.

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Two mobile phones comparing an unresponsive website with a responsive website

📱 The Mobile-First Reality

🚨 Most web traffic is now on mobile, yet many B2B applications still treat mobile as an afterthought. In 2025, this isn't just bad UX—it's bad business.

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image showing four boxes of time saved by document automation, finance company saved 80-90% on expense processing, legal 82% faster legal document drafting, NZ ecample 75% reduction in drafting time and ROI 25,000+ hours saved annually

Document Automation: The Real Impact in Finance & Legal

If you haven't begun automating your documents, here are four very good reasons to call us now.

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image showing bar graph

Why Old-School Quarterly Reporting Is Putting Your Business at Risk

📊 Real-time data isn’t optional anymore. The business landscape is shifting fast.

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image showing random IT costs depicted by line graph with large spikes versus green straight line for continuous progress and a set monthly budget for IT costs

Fix Your Systems Without Breaking the Bank

Every business has that growing list of IT work that needs doing: Security updates that keep getting pushed back System integrations that would save hours of manual work Performance improvements that could boost productivity Legacy systems that need modernising before they become a bigger problem

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poster image heading Hourly rate quote vs outcome based pricing. Fixed pricing with dollar on a price tag, text focus on scope of work, incentive to minimize effort, risk of cost overruns. Value based pricing round orange white and black target with orange arrow in the center, text focus on desired results, align incentives with client, emphasis on value delivered

Stop Paying for Guesswork

We used to spend weeks creating detailed specifications just to provide a precise quote.

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Not Another AI Post

LinkedIn right now "AI will solve everything" Reality: Systems are not evolving as fast as AI

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Illustration for the article 'Why Digital Transformations Struggle Without Buy-In'

💀 Why Digital Transformations Struggle Without Buy-In

At Dark Arts, we’ve seen massive tech investment derailed — not by software, but by people. Resistance. Politics. Fear. Culture.

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Illustration for the article 'AI Risk in Regulated Environments'

🧠 AI Risk in Regulated Environments

“Not every problem should be solved with AI — especially in finance.” AI promises efficiency, but in regulated industries, unverified...

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open hands holding a floating monitor with AI on the screen, blue sparks flying around the hands and monitor

AI apps

Navigating the world of AI apps can feel like learning a new language. Ever wonder why downloading these apps involves confusing credit systems?

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Man sitting on a tree branch with a briefcase in one hand the other hand using a saw to cut the branch off nearest the trunk

Is Shadow IT Silently Sabotaging Your Business Growth?

Here's what happens when critical business data lives in spreadsheets and local databases instead of your centralised systems

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orange and black abacus on a laptop screen

🏦 The Great Legacy System Debate

Is your core financial system ageing? Performance issues, slow compliance updates and team hesitance are common. Should you rewrite from scratch or modernise?

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