Technology became the bottleneck
Overlapping systems, unclear ownership, and delivery that gets slower with every quarter.
See where I would start Bergen-based · working internationally
Your problem,
treated like mine.
I help fintechs and complex product companies untangle difficult product, technology, and AI decisions—then turn the plan into something the team can actually ship and operate.
Independent. Direct. A little too invested. Coffee usually involved.
Max on stageVisa Innovation Program · 2023
FounderProductTechnology
Built in the real world, recognised in public.
Founder of the YearNordic Startup Awards · 2023
Mastercard LighthouseFINITIV selected
Visa Innovation ProgramEurope · 2023
CEO & founderGoscore · since 2019
Where I usually enterYou do not need “AI consulting.”
You do not need “AI consulting.”
You need a hard decision unstuck.
Most engagements begin with one of these sentences, followed by a diagram that has clearly been edited by six people.
The AI idea needs to become real
A promising prototype exists. Value, data, risk, and production responsibility do not line up yet.
See where I would startA senior decision cannot wait
The company needs product and technical judgement now, without pretending a permanent hire happens tomorrow.
See where I would startThe first engagement
The Clarity Sprint.
A focused review for one expensive, politically awkward, or technically messy decision.
Describe the messy version01
Listen
Leadership, product, engineering, risk—the stories rarely match on day one.
02
Map
Systems, decisions, dependencies, owners, and the things everybody works around.
03
Decide
Options with trade-offs, a recommendation, stop conditions, and the next 90 days.
Four ways I show up
Choose the situation, not the buzzword.
01
Product & technology audit
When systems overlap, delivery slows down, or ownership is unclear.
- dependency map
- risk register
- 30/60/90-day plan
02
AI opportunity & readiness
When the company wants AI, but nobody trusts the first use case yet.
- use-case scorecard
- build / buy decision
- validation plan
03
Fractional product & tech leadership
When senior decisions cannot wait for the next executive hire.
- strategy & roadmap
- team ownership
- delivery leadership
04
Fintech decision systems
For credit, risk, open banking, affordability, fraud, and onboarding.
- product feasibility
- decision design
- data & risk model
A useful first conversation
What is actually broken?
Six honest answers. No email gate. This is a direction finder, not a pretend audit.
01
Do two or more systems contain overlapping customer data or business logic?
02
Does one person, vendor, or spreadsheet hold knowledge the business cannot lose?
03
Is delivery slower than leadership expects, without a shared explanation for why?
04
Have AI prototypes struggled to become reliable, measured production workflows?
05
Is compliance treated as a late approval step instead of a product constraint?
06
Is a major build, buy, integrate, or migration decision currently stuck?
Selected work
Real work. Status included.
Public product, confidential advisory, or concept-stage: the label stays attached. Switch every case between executive, product, and technical views.
Goscore · fintech company
Public product
Turning cross-border financial data into decisions lenders can use.
Built a fintech company around a very practical problem: people move countries faster than their financial history does.
- My role
- Founder & CEO
- Period
- 2019–present
- Evidence
- Public company, product, and programme record
What changed
Positioned cross-border scoring and financial inclusion as a commercial risk problem—not a charity story—and translated the product for banks, lenders, and enterprise partners.
Norwegian credit information companyOpen banking + transactional dataMastercard & Visa programme selection
No mystery KPI inside.
Sprove / sprovid · proptech
Public / shipped
Open-banking evidence for a fairer rent conversation.
During the COVID-19 crisis, temporarily laid-off tenants needed a credible way to show how their finances had changed and ask landlords for temporary rent relief.
- My role
- Creator · Goscore founder team
- Period
- 2020
- Evidence
- Public: Tink case study, EUvsVirus record, and Devpost
What changed
Turned a sudden social and financial problem into a narrow product: give tenants and landlords current evidence for a difficult conversation instead of relying on an outdated credit report.
EUvsVirus recognised projectTink open bankingBuilt for rent relief
No mystery KPI inside.
Financial services · platform consolidation
Confidential audit
A staged route out of two overlapping product platforms.
Leadership had two systems, duplicated data, unclear ownership, and a maintenance-heavy integration layer. A rewrite would have frozen the business.
- My role
- Independent product & technology audit
- Period
- Fixed-scope review
- Evidence
- Real engagement; client and operating details confidential
What changed
Made the real decision visible: where to consolidate, what to isolate, and how to move without betting the business on one large migration.
current-state maptransition optionsprioritised action plan
No mystery KPI inside.
When / Nomi · consumer finance
Concept — clearly labelled
Financial guidance built around timing, not another budget.
Designed a consumer-finance concept that looks for meaningful moments when a person may benefit from acting—not just another dashboard that describes last month.
- My role
- Product strategy & concept design
- Period
- Exploration / concept
- Evidence
- Concept-stage work; no launch or KPI claimed
What changed
Explored a product category between budgeting and comparison: help people recognise when doing nothing has a cost, without pretending every signal should become advice.
concept-stagemoment-based product designno production claim
No mystery KPI inside.
What you leave with
Advisory work should produce things people can use.
No 84-slide archaeological record of every meeting. The exact mix changes, but these are the useful artefacts I work toward.
01Executive decision memo
02Current-state architecture map
03Product & system dependency map
04AI use-case scorecard
05Risk & compliance register
06Target-state options
07Prioritised roadmap
08Team & ownership model
09Implementation backlog
10Board-ready summary
Not a stock photo.Explaining the thing in a Goscore T-shirt.
Maksim Hardziyenak · Max Gordienok
I work where finance, technology, and real people make each other complicated.
I am a fintech founder in Bergen, Norway. I started Goscore because financial inclusion stops being an abstract mission when moving countries makes your history disappear and an ordinary financial product becomes harder to access.
Since 2019, I have worked between product, data, risk, partnerships, and the awkward reality of legacy systems. That is also where I am most useful to other companies: between the board-level question and the production-level consequence.
“I will tell you if the best move is cheaper, slower, or to wait six months. It is not always excellent for consulting revenue. It is usually excellent for trust.”
Home baseBergen, Norway
Current roleCEO & founder, Goscore
Working styleIndependent, direct, hands-on
My working viewNothing important is only technical.
How I work
Value and compliance are designed together.
The goal is not compliance theatre. It is to create something useful that can still survive risk review, production operations, and regulatory scrutiny.
- 01Start with the decision
What should change, for whom, and how will we know?
- 02Map the operating reality
People, data, vendors, workarounds, incentives, and failure modes.
- 03Make trade-offs explicit
Build, buy, integrate, postpone, or stop—with the cost of each option visible.
Notes from the messy part
What I think after the demo ends.
Fintech, AI, and technology without the conference fog. Written from product decisions, founder work, and systems that still need to run on Monday.
018 min read
Open banking made the data available. It did not make the decision fair.
Transaction data can make a financial picture more current and useful. It can also create false confidence unless the decision, explanation, and customer consequence are designed together.
028 min read
The pilot worked. Production still said no.
A successful AI demo answers whether something can work. Production asks who owns it, how it fails, and whether the economics survive the boring cases.
037 min read
Your AI problem is probably a workflow problem
Before choosing a model, find the decision, the owner, and the part of the work that should change. Sometimes the right AI strategy is a better workflow.
Questions you would email anyway
Useful before we talk.
01Who is this best for?+
Fintechs, complex B2B product companies, and leadership teams facing a consequential product, technology, or AI decision. My deepest specialist experience is in financial data, credit, risk, open banking, and regulated products.
02Do you only advise, or can you help execute?+
Both. A Clarity Sprint can stand alone, or I can stay for fractional leadership, architecture decisions, team alignment, vendor selection, and implementation support.
03What if we are not ready for AI?+
Then we should say so clearly. Sometimes the right result is better automation, cleaner ownership, stronger data, or waiting until the economics make sense.
04Can you work with confidential systems and teams?+
Yes. Much of this work is confidential by nature. Public case studies label what is verified, confidential, or client-reported instead of blurring them together.
05How do you handle regulation?+
Value, risk, privacy, and compliance are product constraints from the beginning. I am not a law firm, and I bring specialist legal counsel into the work when formal advice is required.
Start here
Tell me the messy version.
No deck required. Tell me what feels stuck, what decision is coming, and what happens if nothing changes.