Dynamic Planner appoints AI CTO and chief architect for adviser-tech push

TL;DR:

• UK financial planning technology firm Dynamic Planner has appointed three senior executives to accelerate its AI-led growth strategy, naming Rory McLaren as chief technology officer and long-serving technology leader Piers Lawson as chief architect.
• McLaren joins from Kaizen Reporting, where he authored the company’s AI manifesto, and has a first-class degree in computer science with an AI specialisation and more than 20 years in regulated financial services technology.
• Resultsense view: this is the kind of mid-market UK financial services hire — agentic AI specifically named, regulated-FS background insisted upon — that the AWS data on UK FS hiring times (now nine months on average) is making harder and more expensive across the sector.

Dynamic Planner has also appointed Ian McEwan as chief revenue officer, with responsibility for sales, marketing and customer success. McEwan brings more than 25 years of experience in enterprise technology businesses, including senior roles at IBM and Aryaka Networks.

The technology shape of the appointments

McLaren and Lawson form a senior technology leadership team focused on advancing AI and agentic AI capabilities across the Dynamic Planner platform. The specific mention of agentic AI in the announcement is notable: it signals the firm is preparing to deploy systems that can take autonomous actions inside adviser workflows, not only summarise or recommend.

McLaren’s background pairs the technical credential (computer science specialising in AI) with the regulatory exposure (Deutsche Börse, Kaizen Reporting) that UK FCA-regulated buyers increasingly require in their technology leadership. The combination is genuinely scarce — and is exactly the combination the AWS labour-market research separately published this week identifies as the pinch point widening UK FS hiring times.

What Dynamic Planner is pitching

Chief executive Ben Goss said AI and agentic AI represented “the greatest opportunity we have seen in our 23 years of innovation” to help close the advice gap and scale trusted financial advice. The firm framed the appointments as a commitment to ensuring adviser firms had “the capabilities, governance and trusted data and models to embrace it with confidence”.

The advice gap — the gap between people who would benefit from regulated financial advice and those who can afford it — is a long-running UK regulatory concern that the FCA has explicitly invited the industry to address with technology, including under the Consumer Duty regime. Dynamic Planner’s strategy positions AI as the tool to widen the share of UK consumers reachable by regulated advisers.

UK adviser-tech context

Dynamic Planner is one of a small cluster of UK technology firms supplying adviser platforms, risk-profiling tools and investment-modelling capabilities to regulated wealth firms. The sector has been moving steadily towards agentic AI: tools that draft suitability letters, conduct preliminary fact-finding or run scenario analysis against client circumstances rather than simply showing static portfolio models.

Each significant agentic deployment in adviser-tech raises the same governance questions UK supervisors have been signalling on for the past two years: model documentation, ongoing monitoring, explainability to clients, and audit trails sufficient for FCA scrutiny. Hiring senior technologists with regulated-FS experience — as Dynamic Planner has done here — is the prerequisite for getting those answers right.

Looking forward

Watch for what Dynamic Planner ships first under the new leadership team. The credibility test for agentic adviser-tech is not the demo, but whether the FCA, PRA, IFA networks and end clients all accept the audit trail the system produces. Dynamic Planner’s senior hires give the firm the credentials to make that case — execution remains the harder part.