Fueling ascent.
Probity Ledgers is the independent advisory practice of A. Michelle Petigny. A career in strategy, transactions and product, from McKinsey & Company and Mitchell Madison Group to digital assets and secure communications, now applied to the question most leadership teams are asking: where AI belongs in the business, and how to use it well.
Each is scoped before work begins and led personally.
A short, fixed-scope assessment of how your business side uses AI today and how it should. You leave with a clear picture, a sound starter toolkit, and a short list of pilots worth funding.
For executive teams, boards and owners of mid-sized firms. How it runs
Focused one-hour consultations for investors, operators and research teams, booked directly or through the expert networks I work with.
For investors, consultancies and corporate strategy teams.
The work behind most of the career record: strategic assessments, acquisition and divestiture planning, sourcing and outsourcing economics, and product leadership from concept to launch.
For CEOs, founders and investment committees.
Most firms already use AI: in drafting, research, analysis and customer work, often without a common toolset or rules. The review puts structure around what is already happening, then points investment where it will pay.
Interviews and a short survey across functions to map which AI tools are in use, by whom, on what data, and under which vendor terms.
Each function rated on two axes: the value AI could add, and the exposure it creates for client data, contracts and reputation.
A baseline toolset, a plain-language usage policy, and working practices for prompting, review and record-keeping, delivered in a working session with your team.
The best pilot candidates written up as one-page briefs: the problem, the data involved, the success measure and the build effort, ready for your team or a build partner.
The review evaluates and equips. It does not solve your business problems with AI or build systems on your behalf, which keeps the advice independent of any build budget.
When a pilot calls for custom build work, I can introduce a qualified specialist partner with a written brief. Any relationship with a recommended partner is disclosed at the time of the introduction.
Selected engagements, each tagged with where the work was done; clients are described rather than named.
Steered development of a platform that keeps a digital record of fuel transactions and uses AI to model emissions by vessel and fuel batch from lab, burn and voyage data.
Led initial product design and platform strategy for curated, AI-driven access to health, education and financial services.
Launched the fund’s cryptocurrency practice across products, portfolio management and a knowledge center, and hired and led the team that set up compliance and internal training.
Designed a decentralized platform letting investors build individual commercial real estate portfolios.
Designed a secure wallet platform for currencies, trusts, health records and other business and personal digital assets.
Directed development of a drag-and-drop video platform for structured investment review.
Member app and staff scheduling app for private clubs, with a private digital community, member matching, curated advertising and a digital pro shop.
Designed a network of community learning centers and a curriculum in music, dance and immersive technology for the next generation of performers.
Designed a communications platform for the Commonwealth Network of Contact Persons, the attorneys-general lawyers who cooperate on criminal cases across member countries: end-to-end encryption, three-factor authentication, and ledger-based identity and audit trails.
Authored a white paper and led training on authentication, identity and secure messaging.
Led product for APIs and apps that protect digital assets using the secure hardware in phones and computers. Shipped a security toolkit, an authentication app, and secure messaging and file transfer.
App giving ambulance and emergency-room teams controlled access to patient records shared among pre-certified parties over a decentralized network.
Produced a three-hour presentation on the business case for nationwide electronic check presentment, with investment, run-rate and cost impact across every banking sector.
Lead manager: framed strategic options, start-up costs, joint-venture economics and operations across check processing, retail bill payment and procurement cards.
Devised and prototyped a dual-account prepaid card system that cut remittance costs for unbanked users by more than a third.
Prototyped and field-tested an in-store system accepting card and bitcoin payments with three-factor authentication, and no card or phone needed.
Strategy, marketing and regulatory roadmaps for prepaid card and mobile payments.
Feature-phone order management linked to a prepaid payroll card for a field sales force.
Designed a reloadable debit card denominated in bitcoin.
Devised the bank’s North American market strategy as lead manager on an extended engagement; recommendations delivered by the US CEO to the European board of directors.
Led the US market entry strategy for the investment banking group, including an assessment of the US derivatives market and entry options.
Integration of commercial and investment banking after a merger, organizational realignment of corporate finance and lending, and long-term compensation options to build securities and derivatives trading.
Directed a 12-member client task force evaluating strategic options for the corporate lending branch network under the new North American strategy.
Directed a $3.5 billion pre-closing review across eight task forces: legal, financial, IT, services, marketing and HR, and resolved closing showstoppers.
Worked with the CEO and leadership committee of a $3.8 billion mortgage company to set ten growth priorities, benchmark channels and platforms, and identify over $75 million in annual profit improvement.
Designed a two-year program across the whole purchased expense base, yielding 18% annual savings; led nine teams through the first phase.
Assessed the economics, billing and service levels of a $55 million arrangement; negotiated a 20% reduction in ongoing cost with the CEO, CFO and CIO.
Directed an $800 million acquisition strategy to expand five lines of business: structured the team, built the valuation and wrote the recommendations.
Designed and moderated C-suite seminars on re-engineering and emerging practice, used to build the firm’s presence abroad.
Specified an internal online marketplace for a $100 million expense category, consolidated supplier service levels across the system, and wrote future RFP requirements.
Feasibility, synergy and bidding-range work on a three-way joint venture, a cross-border printing merger and a pipeline-equipment acquisition.
Designed an integrated multi-company valuation and leveraged buyout model with candidate deal structures across several Swedish corporations.
Built the value models and competitive profiles and recommended the purchase price on a $650 million acquisition; the client completed the deal.
Valuations and ratio analysis for an unsolicited $150 million offer.
Lead analyst on buyout and exchange-offer scenarios and the restructuring presentation for a $65 million chain.
Training manual and software for the investment banking unit’s senior staff.
A. Michelle Petigny founded Probity Ledgers as an independent home for strategy, product and security work, and leads every engagement personally.
The foundation is corporate finance: mergers and acquisitions in investment banking, then pioneering valuation and buyout modeling in McKinsey & Company’s corporate-finance practice, then most of the 1990s at Mitchell Madison Group as a founding member and later partner, including the payments analysis presented to the Federal Reserve.
The practice since has followed money and trust as they moved onto new technology: prepaid and mobile payments, digital assets, hardware-secured communications, and now the working use of AI inside ordinary businesses. The common thread is turning agreements, sourcing and payments into structures people can rely on.
Providers who hold other people's data should operate under clear rules about who may use it, and for what.
Accountability holds up best when it is built into a system from the start, not checked after the fact.
Recommendations are not tied to a build budget, a software license or a staffing plan.
Open-source technology, transparent and auditable, is the most durable base for systems that must be trusted.
Perspectives on AI at work, data sovereignty and trusted computing.
Most AI risk in mid-sized firms comes from informal use, not from big projects. An inventory is the cheapest control there is.
Platform providers collect six kinds of user-generated data. The ownership question most enterprises have never asked, and should.
The firms that lead will govern their data before they govern their models.
Tell me what you are weighing. I reply personally, and an NDA is available before any detail is shared.
hello@probityledgers.com