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PHILIP CHEUNG

AI Product & Transformation Lead

Financial Services | Fintech | Applied GenAI

school MSc Computer Science, AI & Data Science (Merit)
location_on Reading, United Kingdom
Philip Cheung
person

Professional Summary

AI Product and Transformation Lead with more than 10 years across financial services, fintech, quantitative markets and digital platforms, currently Head of AI at a Swiss corporate finance advisory firm. Translates commercial and financial-services problems into prioritised AI use cases, then owns product vision, MVP scope, roadmaps, requirements, evaluation criteria and governance through to adoption. The current portfolio spans an ultra-low-latency AI inference cloud (Qorinix), a read-only AI money assistant over Open Banking (LaSpend), a Swiss consumer marketplace (Fixxmi) and an AI-native trading desk. Bridges executives, users, domain experts, technical contributors and vendors, and accelerates discovery and delivery through AI-assisted prototyping and coding agents. Comfortable deep in the technical detail, from LLM, RAG and agentic patterns to inference latency and cost trade-offs, evaluation harnesses and cloud delivery: able to shape requirements, evaluate outputs and direct governed delivery with confidence. MSc Computer Science, AI and Data Science (Merit).

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Core Capabilities

insights AI Product & Transformation
  • AI strategy and use-case prioritisation
  • Product vision, MVP definition and roadmaps
  • Business cases, value hypotheses and adoption planning
  • Transformation operating models
assignment Product & Delivery Leadership
  • Product discovery and user needs
  • Requirements, PRDs, user stories and acceptance criteria
  • Backlog and release prioritisation
  • Cross-functional delivery coordination
  • Stakeholder and executive communication
verified_user Responsible AI & Governance
  • Output and model evaluation
  • Human-review workflows
  • Data, privacy, auditability and risk considerations
  • Provider and vendor evaluation
  • Quality, cost and operational controls
account_balance Financial Services Domain
  • Corporate finance and M&A workflows
  • Investment analysis
  • Quantitative markets and trading
  • Fintech operations
  • Risk, compliance and regulated processes
smart_toy AI Solution Fluency
  • LLM and RAG concepts
  • Agentic and workflow-based AI
  • API, data integration and cloud-delivery concepts
  • AI-assisted prototyping
  • Evaluation and quality assurance
route How I Deliver
  • Problem-first use-case selection
  • Smallest product slice that proves value
  • Evaluation criteria defined before build
  • AI-assisted prototyping and coding agents
  • Quality, cost and latency governed from day one
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Professional Experience

Head of AI

Weidmann & Cie. AG
location_on London, UK (Hybrid) calendar_today December 2024 - Present

Swiss corporate finance advisory firm (M&A and growth advisory) building an applied-AI product portfolio: Qorinix (ultra-low-latency AI inference cloud), LaSpend (read-only AI money assistant over Open Banking), Fixxmi (Swiss consumer marketplace), pricing and insurance comparison workflows, and an AI-native trading desk.

  • Owns the firm's AI strategy and use-case portfolio across its product lines, prioritising investment against commercial value, risk and regulatory constraints; presents strategy and progress to a finance-led management board
  • Owns 0-to-1 product direction for Qorinix, the firm's ultra-low-latency AI inference cloud targeting sub-200ms time-to-first-token (p50), 100-200+ tokens per second and sub-10ms cache-hit latency for latency-sensitive workloads such as real-time agents, voice and trading alerts: MVP scope, phased delivery, release gates and go-live criteria across the web, control-plane and AI runtime layers
  • Defined the platform's evaluation and governance model: latency, quality and cost benchmarks, provider routing and failover, per-call cost ledger, usage-based billing and entitlements, with human-review workflows where risk requires
  • Shaped consumer-facing propositions: LaSpend, a read-only AI money assistant over regulated Open Banking data (subscription detection, waste scoring and assisted cancellation, never moving customer money, human-in-the-loop for user-triggered actions), and Fixxmi AI lead matching across 12+ service categories (DE-CH/EN) within GDPR and nFADP boundaries
  • Translates business, operational and regulatory requirements into executable platform plans with senior stakeholders, and directs delivery through technical contributors and AI-assisted development workflows
  • Commissioned an internal 12-provider inference benchmark to ground model selection, latency and cost decisions; leads a cross-functional team of five across development and financial analysis

AI Engineer & Technical Architect (AI Transformation & Delivery Leadership)

Pacific Cloud Computing Ltd.
location_on Hong Kong & Remote UK calendar_today December 2021 - December 2024

Promoted internally from Senior Software Engineer to lead the firm's AI transformation across SaaS, analytics and market-intelligence products.

  • Defined and prioritised the firm's AI use-case portfolio and adoption roadmap, moving AI from experiments into production capabilities; oversaw the launch of three multi-tenant SaaS platforms with subscription management, usage analytics and automated billing
  • Directed delivery of the firm's real-time ML inference capability, a platform that served millions of daily predictions at sub-100ms latency; set requirements, acceptance criteria and evaluation gates
  • Shaped the firm's enterprise retrieval (RAG) and market-intelligence NLP capabilities, defining evaluation methodology and quality expectations for domain-specific queries
  • Oversaw the model-improvement cycle (retraining, A/B testing and monitoring) and provider selection across the ML estate
  • Established AI/ML working practices, ran architecture reviews and mentored an agile development team of 8 engineers
  • Guided quantitative-markets decision support: cross-asset anomaly detection and price-forecasting research feeding trading workflows

Senior Software Engineer

Pacific Cloud Computing Ltd.
location_on Hong Kong calendar_today January 2015 - November 2021
  • Delivered an enterprise document management SaaS with real-time collaboration for corporate clients
  • Delivered e-commerce platform capabilities including multi-currency and crypto-enabled payments; the SEO programme achieved top search rankings
  • Pioneered the firm's blockchain product initiatives: smart-contract products, NFT marketplace support and DeFi analytics dashboards

Senior Product Manager (Technical) / Web & Content Manager

Groupon.com
location_on Hong Kong calendar_today April 2013 - December 2014
  • Led platform modernisation from a monolithic to a service-oriented architecture as technical product manager, coordinating engineering delivery and business stakeholders
  • Introduced an A/B testing and SEO programme that delivered 150% traffic growth
  • Ran digital product operations and commercial prioritisation for the marketplace: merchandising, pricing structure and merchant coordination in an Agile environment

Senior Operations Manager

SoManyCall Telecom
location_on Hong Kong calendar_today March 2008 - April 2013
  • Oversaw strategic and operational delivery for custom software solutions in the telecoms sector, achieving a 25% annual growth rate
  • Led a multi-disciplinary team across the full project lifecycle
psychology

Core Technical Competencies

memory Machine Learning & Deep Learning
Python PyTorch Scikit-learn XGBoost TensorFlow Transformers Decision Trees LSTM/GRU Fine-tuning Feature Engineering
published_with_changes MLOps & Production ML
Automated Retraining Model Evaluation A/B Testing Canary Deployment Drift Monitoring Model Serving ONNX Triton Quantisation
api Backend, APIs & Microservices
FastAPI Microservices REST APIs Node.js TypeScript React Next.js Event-Driven Streaming / SSE
cloud Cloud, DevOps & Infrastructure
AWS GCP Cloudflare Docker Kubernetes Terraform CI/CD OpenTelemetry Multi-Region Failover
storage Data Pipelines & Storage
PostgreSQL Redis TimescaleDB pgvector Firestore Cloudflare D1 / R2 Batch Pipelines Real-Time Pipelines
smart_toy Generative AI & LLM Systems
RAG LLM Orchestration LangChain Multi-Provider Routing Prompt Registry Guardrails Function Calling Eval Harness
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Research & Selected Projects

LLM Arena Benchmark
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LLM Arena, 12-Provider Benchmark LLM Infra

Side-by-side real-time benchmark harness across 12 frontier and fast-inference providers. Streaming token-by-token with live leaderboard, TTFT p50/p95 analytics, tokens/sec, estimated cost-per-task and service-tier selectors. Per-provider model picker, run-count (1-20) for statistical stability and quick TTFT-turbo profiles. Next.js 14, TypeScript, server-side API isolation, streaming-SSE.

LaSpend AI Money Assistant
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LaSpend, AI Money Assistant Consumer AI

Read-only AI money assistant over regulated UK Open Banking: subscription detection, recurring-spend dashboard, waste scoring and assisted cancellation with verified action receipts. Never moves customer money; human-in-the-loop for all user-triggered actions; PII-minimised inputs and deterministic fallback when models fail. Cloudflare Pages + Functions + D1 architecture, React 19 + Vite + Tailwind frontend.

Fixxmi Swiss Marketplace
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Fixxmi, AI Swiss Service Marketplace Consumer AI

Swiss-first B2C service-job lead marketplace with AI-powered intent classification and lead matching across 12+ categories in DE-CH / EN. Pay-per-lead monetisation with Stripe Credit Packs, nFADP / GDPR-compliant data boundaries, Firestore-backed real-time admin dashboard. Next.js 15 static export + Firebase Cloud Functions (Node 20) + Firestore europe-west6.

Audit-Grade AI Governance Loop
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Audit-Grade AI Governance Loop Governance

Closed-loop flow applied across every firm AI product: policy check, evidence-pack retrieval, prompt control, model router, action runtime, audit ledger, policy feedback. Every call versioned, costed, support-traceable and replayable. Content-addressed evidence packs, per-product cost attribution, human-in-the-loop escalation for high-risk cases.

Low-Latency Inference Mesh
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Low-Latency Inference Mesh ML Infra

Distributed ML inference pipeline serving hundreds of predictions per day at <200ms TTFT across classification, sentiment, affordability scoring and anomaly detection. Shard-aware routing, warm-pool autoscaling, ONNX-compiled models with fp16 quantisation, cache-through Redis tiering, multi-region active-active with health-weighted failover. FastAPI, Redis, TimescaleDB, Triton.

LLM-Augmented HFT (MSc Research)
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LLM-Augmented HFT (MSc Research) Research

Novel architecture fusing LLM narrative understanding with real-time HFT. Custom transformer with attention heads over microstructure features, ensemble gating and latency-aware inference scheduling that down-routes heavy heads on tight time budgets. AI-assisted development workflow with a three-gate validation framework delivered an 85% reduction in strategy development time. Python, PyTorch, CCXT, Ray Serve, Triton.

school

Education

psychology
MSc Computer Science, AI & Data Science
University of Wolverhampton, UK
2023 - 2025 | Grade: Merit
Dissertation: LLM-Augmented High-Frequency Trading Strategy Development
Modules: Deep Machine Learning, Intelligent Agents, Data Science & Mining, Applying AI, Cloud Computing, Research Methods
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Bachelor of Business Administration
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
1995
Marketing with Information Systems minor
verified

Selected Certifications

cloud
MLOps Specialization
Google Cloud | 2024
auto_awesome
Gemini Certified Educator
Google | 2025-2028
terminal
CS50x Computer Science
Harvard | 2024
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SFC Licensing Exams (Papers 1/7/8/12)
HKSI, Hong Kong | 2021
Open to AI Product, AI Transformation and Head of AI roles across financial services, fintech and applied GenAI.
Full UK right to work | Based near London (Reading) | Hybrid or remote | Languages: English, Cantonese, Mandarin
folder_shared Portfolio available on request