Starting from the Person
Article 5 chronicling the development of Predictive Purpose
I want to tell you about a conversation that started differently from almost every other conversation I’ve had in thirty years of technology work.
Most briefs begin with the system. Here is the platform we need. Here is the problem it has to solve. Here is the budget and the timeline and the definition of success. The person who will eventually use it appears somewhere in the middle, usually described as a user type or a customer segment, abstracted to the point where their actual life is no longer visible.
This one started with the person. Immediately, specifically, and without apology.
The founders were former senior military officers. That background gave the conversation a particular quality — a directness, a clarity about what mattered and why, a complete absence of the corporate softening that usually surrounds difficult truths. When they described the problem they were trying to solve there was no preamble and no hedging.
People who serve in the armed forces are being failed by the financial system. Systematically. Not through malice. Through indifference. Through a definition of the standard customer that simply doesn’t account for the reality of a life spent in service.
I remember that moment, not because it was complicated. Because it was so straightforwardly, obviously wrong — and nobody had done anything about it.
The edge case that isn’t an edge case
A soldier is deployed to an active theatre. The circumstances of their financial life change immediately and significantly. Access to standard banking services becomes difficult or impossible. The financial decisions that need to be made don’t pause for deployment. Bills continue. Family needs continue. The mortgage doesn’t wait.
Meanwhile, back home, a spouse needs to act. To access accounts. To make decisions. To manage the financial reality of a household whose primary earner is unreachable in a conflict zone.
In a standard retail banking platform this is an edge case. An unusual circumstance requiring manual intervention and exceptions processes. Something to be managed around rather than designed for.
The founders didn’t see it as an edge case. They saw it as a defining characteristic of the life their customers actually lived. Not an exception to be accommodated. A reality to be designed around from the start.
Auto-delegation — the ability for a serving partner to grant their spouse full authority to act on their behalf, triggered by deployment and managed through the platform — sounds simple stated that way. But in the architecture of a standard financial services platform it is genuinely complicated, because standard platforms were never built with this situation in mind.
That difference in assumptions is everything.
What the founders understood that the mainstream market didn’t
Financial services institutions had looked at serving military personnel and made a calculation. The demographic was small. The circumstances were complex and costly to design for. The return on investment didn’t justify the effort.
So they were served badly, or not at all. Treated as a niche. An edge case.
What the mainstream market had failed to see was that the military community is not just a demographic. It is a culture. A set of values and relationships and mutual obligations that extend far beyond the individuals currently serving. Veterans. Families. The blue light services — police, fire, ambulance — whose circumstances share many of the same characteristics.
The founders understood this because they had lived it. They weren’t designing for a market segment. They were designing for a community they were part of.
The surprise I couldn’t shake
My role was partly technical — establishing the architecture, supporting the business proposition, providing the reality check that every conviction-driven venture needs.
But the feeling I kept returning to throughout the work wasn’t technical satisfaction. It was something simpler and more uncomfortable.
Surprise.
Not at what the founders were building. At the fact that nobody had built it before.
These were people putting their lives on the line. And the financial system that the country they were protecting had built had looked at them and seen an edge case.
Not a priority. Not a community deserving of genuine design consideration. An edge case.
Why? Not because of bad intentions. Because of a definition of the standard customer so deeply embedded in the architecture of financial services that the people who built those systems had never thought to question it.
The mainstream market wasn’t cruel. It was incurious. It had defined its purpose narrowly and built efficiently inside that definition and never looked beyond it to ask who was being failed.
The founders had looked. They had seen clearly. And they had decided to build from the wider frame rather than petition the narrow one to change.
That’s the difference. Not a better version of what existed. A different starting point entirely.
*This is the fifth entry in the Predictive Purpose journal — a book being built in public. If you’re reading this for the first time, start at the beginning. Subscribe at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.