The Man Behind the Articles

The Early Seeds

Back when license plates were a full 6-digit number here in The Bahamas, my dad and I would play this game in the car. We would add the full 6 digits and see who would be the first one to finish. Or we might multiply them out, or just see various patterns in the numbers, like if you split them into 3 2-digit numbers that they were all divisible by 3 or something. Numbers were always our thing. I didn’t know it then, but that game was training me to spot patterns in randomness – a skill I’d rely on years later when staring at thousands of transactions in a digital payments department.

I would visit my grandparents during summer breaks. They had an encyclopedia set and I would take them off the shelf and read them on days when there wasn’t anything else to do. A pursuit of knowledge in down time, learning even when it wasn’t required. I grew up with a grandfather who was proud to say he was the first mechanic on Eleuthera to be able to take down a transmission. He didn’t just know how to swap car parts; he understood them from the inside out. I remember one summer he had an electrician’s book he was reading. He was always pursuing knowledge, even when he was close to retirement.

I think that mentality was passed down to each of his children and myself. One of my uncles isn’t just an electrician, he’s an electrical engineer. Another uncle, when I was growing up, understood everything about tech. The engineer mindset to understand a process from the ground up, not just be able to reproduce a desired result, that is what is at the heart of it all.

Building Blocks

I also loved LEGOs growing up. I had this one creator set that from the same pieces could be a plane, a boat, or a helicopter. I built one, had it on display for a bit, and then broke it down and built the other. Once I had built each, I started building my own creations. As I added more sets to the collection, the building possibilities only expanded. I remember asking for this LEGO Atlantis set for my grade 9 graduation and some of my family couldn’t understand why. LEGO fueled my creativity and gave me a space to create something I could only see in my mind.

Photos used with permission. ©2025 The LEGO Group.

When I got into high school there was a choice for electives and the tagline for accounting was: “If you like Math, this might be for you” or something like that. Didn’t have to tell me twice. Accounting was a blast. I was always at the head of the class. I was one of the few students selected to take the Pitman Level 1 Bookkeeping and received a First-Class Pass in grade 10.

One of my dad’s rules while growing up was ‘Do good in school’. In school, I didn’t like all subjects, but I did my best. I had a teacher who would grade us at a college level in high school. I learned to stop focusing on the grade and appreciate that I understood the information. When the final exam came, I would pass, but throughout the semester, a hard C. The knowledge was more important than the grade.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but that was the start of a quiet conviction: what’s true matters more than what looks good. A passing grade in a class where you don’t understand what was taught is just delayed failure. A degree or certification looks nice, but can you take what you learned and apply it on the job and in your life? A clean report based on messy data is just a liability. I learned to trust the foundation, not the surface. That instinct has followed me in every role since.

A Pattern Emerging

At some point I had an issue with my laptop, and I did some research myself to fix it. I was playing around with Command Prompt & the BIOS Boot up menu. Eventually I realized that most people would have just left it and given it to a professional to solve. I just felt like if I knew the right steps to take, I could do it myself. When I was in the digital payments department, this inspired me to pursue an A+ certification as a foot in the door for IT. I had a curiosity about computers and always felt I could take up a career with them. At the time, I would regularly tell myself that I would only leave that department for either a position in the IT department or Finance department, Finance just happened to open first.

While in the digital payments department, there were thousands of transactions each day. I could see patterns that others didn’t. I felt there had to be a way to take what I could see with the naked eye and help others to see it. That is where I stumbled onto Data Analytics. I could learn the tools that would help me be able to take what I could see and translate it into something management could use to act on.

After joining the Finance team, I continued the pursuit of data analysis with the goal of becoming a Financial Analyst. The FMVA & BIDA certifications gave me those skills. I designed models and reports/workbooks that could show patterns not seen by the naked eye. I could take a thought or curiosity and build something to see if my hunch was right.

The Pattern Revealed

Over time, my work helped me to realize that the best models could still be inaccurate if the data being fed isn’t accurate. That is what I think drew me to eventually discover Financial Data Architecture.

I could keep that curiosity, creativity, and skills and design something that I knew could be trusted from the ground up. I would see each part and understand how they all played a role in the larger picture. I would have the language to share the insights I could see with the finance team, the executives and the tech team in a way that they all understand. I would understand the regulatory landscape well enough to ensure that the system addressed all the essential matters. The role sits right at the intersection of Tech and Finance, tying together my two loves, allowing me to work in the kind of work that satisfies all my passions. It feels like the perfect fit that I have been working towards this entire time.

I see patterns in almost anything. My brain instinctively looks for the hidden structure. I’m not satisfied using a system I don’t understand. I want to see how it works underneath. A curious mind always pursuing new information, disciplined and rigorous, with an engineer’s mindset—that’s the core of who I am.

That’s the person who sits down to write these articles. The same mind that once hunted for patterns in license plates and encyclopedias now searches for structure in finance, data, and the systems that connect them. Everything I share here grows from that same root. If you’ve read this far, you’ve met the man behind the words. The rest is just that curiosity, given room to build.