Hannan Mohammad

The evening I realised the banks I loved were being defended by the wrong people.

It was a Tuesday in early 2020, a few months before I handed back my KPMG badge, and I was sitting in a G-SIB boardroom in Paris, embedded with the client team, on the wrong side of a finding. The inspection team had done a good job — thorough, principled, unsurprising to anyone who had read the file. What surprised me was the bank’s other advisors. Three very well-known firms, each represented by a partner I respected, each briefing the board with a slide deck optimised for the wrong audience. They were presenting to us as a client. They should have been preparing us for a supervisor.

I have worked inside banks for twenty years — in the markets, in the risk function, in the inspection rooms, in the late-night emails to the JST. I have loved that work almost every single day. What I have not loved, especially in the last cycle, is watching capable institutions spend eight-figure fees on advisory programmes that shipped programme plans instead of defensive positions. The banks deserved better. The people running those banks — the CROs, the CFOs, the Heads of Inspection — knew it, and they told me so, often over a coffee, rarely in a meeting.

Ezelman is my answer to that question. It is a small, senior-only boutique. No pyramid, no juniors learning on your inspection, no deck factory. Just practitioners who have sat on your side of the table, who have drafted the letter the JST is going to read, who know the difference between a finding the bank should accept and a finding the bank must contest. I wanted a firm that shows up on the first day with a view, not a workstream plan. I wanted a firm my former colleagues would actually hire if they had to pay the invoice themselves.

The name comes from a childhood memory — a word my grandfather used for someone who can be relied upon when the situation is serious. That is the standard. If we cannot meet it on a given engagement, we will say so, and we will recommend someone who can. The rest of this page is the track record behind that promise.