the steady weight of truth
Consulting at the intersection of senior audit judgment, production AI tooling, and sole practitioner accountability. One chartered professional. Full ownership. No delegation to juniors you have never met.
Atlas Verum is a chartered auditor who builds the systems he advises on. Trained across PwC, Deloitte, and BDO, with eleven years of financial services depth, DK Buledi founded Atlas Verum to deliver audit, controls, and reporting work with the rigour of a Big Four engagement and the speed of a purpose-built AI platform.
One practitioner. Full ownership. No delegation to juniors you have never met. Each engagement is scoped, executed, and signed off by the same person whose name appears at the top of this page.
Tap a practice area for engagement deliverables, applicable standards, and typical timelines.
4–12 weeks depending on group complexity.
Annual cycle with quarterly cadence.
2–8 weeks per transaction or policy.
6–16 weeks initial; ongoing retainer optional.
8–24 weeks; modular by cycle.
4–10 weeks initial build.
10–20 weeks across two close cycles.
3–8 weeks per reporting cycle.
Eleven years inside UK and international financial services. Sector depth is not a marketing line; it is the difference between an opinion that lands and one that gets re-reviewed.
UK ring-fenced banks, international wholesale operations, and capital-markets divisions of global groups. Comfortable with EMIR reporting, IFRS 9 ECL governance, structured-product valuation files, and PRA-led thematic reviews.
Life, non-life, and Lloyd’s market entities. Technical-provision audit support, IFRS 17 transition residue, reinsurance contract analysis, and Solvency II reporting interaction with statutory accounts.
UCITS and AIF managers, private-equity GPs, and segregated-mandate operators. NAV oversight, performance-fee crystallisation, carry waterfall validation, and IFRS / FRS 102 transition for fund vehicles.
EMIs, PIs, lending platforms, and early-stage neo-banks preparing for first statutory audit. Safeguarding audit, capital adequacy interaction, and going-concern files that survive an investor diligence.
Mutual-sector reporting under FRS 102, PRA Cat 1 and 2 supervision, and the specific governance overlay of member ownership. Audit-committee briefings and AFS technical positions calibrated for non-listed mutuals.
Front-office product-control interaction, trading-book IPV, structured-finance SPV consolidation analysis, and integrity controls over fair-value level-3 assets. Working-paper depth that withstands FRC inspection.
Every engagement runs on three pillars. Senior audit judgment from a chartered professional with eleven years of practice. Production AI tooling built by the same practitioner, including AuditEngine, a platform that generates ISA-compliant workpapers from a trial balance upload. And sole practitioner ownership, meaning the person who scopes the work is the person who delivers it and signs it off.
A UK statutory audit automation platform that ingests a trial balance and produces ISA-compliant workpapers. Engineered on Claude API and Python. Deployed and operational.
The technical surface area an Atlas Verum engagement is comfortable operating across.
Familiarity is not expertise everywhere. Engagements are scoped to where the depth is real; a written scope memorandum is the place that is set out explicitly.
A predictable four-stage path from first conversation to signed deliverable.
Thirty minutes. We define the problem, the deliverable, and the standards in play. You leave with a written scope memorandum within forty-eight hours.
A one-page proposal with deliverables, timeline, milestones, and a single fixed fee. No hourly rates. No partner overlay. No surprise scope creep.
Founder-led execution with weekly written updates. AuditEngine and bespoke tooling deployed where the work warrants it. Direct access throughout.
Deliverable issued, reviewed, and signed off. Thirty-day post-engagement support included as standard for follow-up questions and dependency work.
The person who scopes the work is the person who delivers it and signs it off. No partner overlay, no junior delegation.
One number, agreed before work begins. Scope changes scoped and quoted separately. No timesheet surprises on invoice day.
Every engagement leaves a written trail. Working papers, technical positions, and decisions traceable to the source.
Names of clients and the nature of engagements remain confidential. Case studies are anonymised and only with explicit written consent.
Working observations from current engagements. Long form, unfashionably specific, written between engagements rather than during them.
Workpaper generation is a structured-output problem. Judgment is not. The split is what makes the architecture deployable in a regulated environment, and what stops it from drifting into territory that is not a tooling problem.
9 min read · read →Bank ECL files fail in four recurring ways: staging triggers written but not enforced, scenario weights governed but not documented, post-model adjustments that grow without challenge, and disclosures inconsistent with the underlying inputs.
14 min read · read →A good going-concern file is six things, in order: period assessed, cash and liquidity baseline, regulatory and capital baseline, management forecast, stress, and conclusion. The file is forty to fifty pages total.
12 min read · read →A first audit turns on six topics: revenue under IFRS 15, safeguarding evidence, customer-monies classification, going concern with equity rounds in scope, share-based payments, and intercompany debt.
13 min read · read →Eleven years across PwC Pakistan, Deloitte Qatar, PwC UK Banking and Capital Markets, BDO UK Financial Services, and Christiansons Chartered Accountants. Qualified through ACCA with financial services specialisation spanning investment banking, retail banking, building societies, fintech, asset management, and insurance.
Builder of AuditEngine, a UK statutory audit automation platform deployed at auditengine.agency. Engineered in London. Rooted in Sindh. Every engagement is founder-led, from first conversation to final deliverable.
Atlas Verum Limited is a consultancy. Statutory audit opinions in the UK can only be signed by registered auditors holding an audit certificate from a Recognised Supervisory Body (ICAEW, ICAS, ACCA, AAPA, or CAI). Where an engagement requires a signed statutory opinion, Atlas Verum partners with a registered audit firm to deliver the opinion while Atlas Verum runs the file. For all other audit-adjacent work — ICFR, SOX, internal audit, file remediation, technical accounting, controls testing — Atlas Verum delivers directly.
Fixed fees, agreed in writing before work begins. Quoted as a single number, not an hourly range. Scope changes are scoped and quoted separately so there is never a surprise on invoice day. Retainers available for ongoing internal audit or controls work.
Typical clients range from UK subsidiaries of listed groups requiring SOX or JSOX support, through mid-market FCA-regulated entities, to growth-stage fintechs preparing for their first statutory audit. The common thread is complexity, not size.
AuditEngine and a small library of bespoke Claude-powered tools handle the deterministic and the templatable: workpaper drafting, reconciliation, disclosure indexing, walkthrough documentation. Judgment, scoping, sign-off, and the awkward conversations remain entirely human. The split is deliberate.
London. Atlas Verum Limited is registered in England & Wales (Company No. 17203202). Remote-first by default. On-site attendance for stocktake, key meetings, and inspection support is included in fixed fees within the UK; international travel scoped separately.
Independence and conflict checks, AML / KYC under MLR 2017 and the AAT/ACCA money-laundering guidance, and a written engagement letter referencing the relevant ICAEW or ACCA ethical code. Standard but non-negotiable.
Thirty minutes, free, no obligation. We define the problem, the deliverable, and the standards in play. You leave with a written scope memorandum within forty-eight hours. Whether or not you go forward, the memorandum is yours to keep and use.
Yes, where the work falls under UK or IFRS-equivalent standards or relates to UK-listed groups. Past experience covers Qatar, Pakistan, and Japanese parent groups with UK subsidiaries. International travel is scoped separately. Time-zone overlap and written-first communication are the operating defaults.
Engagement information is confidential by default and remains so after delivery. Client names are not published. Case studies, where they appear, are anonymised and only with explicit written consent. Working papers are retained securely for the minimum statutory period and destroyed thereafter.
Thirty-minute scoping call, free, no obligation. Written scope memorandum within forty-eight hours.