A procurement team that spends a day on due diligence will ask this question. CROs ask it twice. Boards ask it once, in writing, and want the answer in the statement of work. This page is that answer. It is deliberately shorter than the stance paper and the procurement pack: one page, five concrete commitments, one clause the client can lift straight into the SoW. We do not mitigate key-person risk by pretending it does not exist. We mitigate it with contract, with discipline, and with a named second pair of senior hands standing by.
Ezelman is a founder-owned boutique with one partner and a roadmap to a second by end-2027 (see stance). That structure is deliberate. It is also the single largest operational risk that a bank’s Third-Party Risk Management team should price when engaging the firm.
We refuse to pretend the risk is absent. On mandates where it is materially larger than the bank can absorb — for example, a twenty-four month CRR3 programme with no internal alternative — we say so at the proposal stage and we decline. On every mandate we do take, the five commitments below apply. They are contractual, not aspirational.
The three numbers a TPRM team should hold Ezelman to, drawn from the Business Continuity Plan tested annually.
The continuity clause below appears verbatim in every Ezelman statement of work for a mandate longer than twelve weeks. Clients are welcome to lift it into their own paper — it is drafted to survive being detached from the Ezelman template without loss of meaning.
Continuity of senior-partner time. The Supplier warrants that the individual named as the Lead Partner in Schedule 1 (the “Lead Partner”) will personally commit at least [ ] hours per calendar week to the engagement, and will personally attend all supervisor-facing meetings, model-defence workshops and Pillar 2 dialogues scheduled under this Statement of Work, save where otherwise consented to in writing by the Client.
Named backstop. The Supplier has pre-briefed, and made available under NDA, [named senior practitioner] (the “Backstop”) as senior cover for any period in which the Lead Partner is materially unavailable. The Backstop’s CV and NDA are annexed to this Statement of Work.
Activation. On any Lead Partner unavailability exceeding five consecutive business days, the Supplier shall, within five further business days, activate the Backstop on the engagement and certify in writing to the Client that working papers have been briefed, the open-issue register handed over and the next supervisor-facing deliverable re-scheduled.
Extended-unavailability termination. Where Lead Partner unavailability extends beyond six consecutive weeks and the Backstop is not, on reasonable Client assessment, acceptable for the remaining scope, the Client may terminate this Statement of Work at that point with no further fee payable beyond (a) work-in-progress on a time-and-materials basis to the date of termination, and (b) reasonable documented close-out costs, capped at [ ]% of the signed SoW value.
Working-paper standard. The Supplier shall maintain the engagement’s working papers at the evidence standard required for an on-site inspection of the Supplier’s premises by the Client’s competent supervisor, at all times during the engagement and for the retention period specified in Schedule 3.
A five-day handover is a real mitigant for most events that would otherwise disrupt a mandate: short-duration illness, scheduling collision, family emergency, extended travel. It is a partial mitigant for a catastrophic event in which the founder is permanently unavailable, because in that scenario the bank’s second pair of senior hands is not the backstop — it is the bank’s own internal team, possibly supported by a new supplier. The continuity clause is drafted so that the bank is not trapped in that scenario (termination rights are clear and fee is capped). It is not drafted to pretend the catastrophic event has no consequence.
For mandates where the bank judges that a catastrophic-event exposure would be materially damaging, the honest answer is that a founder-owned boutique is the wrong supplier at this stage of the firm’s life. That answer will change at end-2027, when a second partner is in place. Until then, we would rather name the boundary than hide it.
Last update: 2026-04-21. This page is edited, rather than archived, when any of the numbers or commitments on it change.
The clause above, negotiated against your bank’s own continuity standard, takes one twenty-minute call with the founder and one pass with legal.