Atilade Oke
Founder, Refinery
BEng Electrical Engineering, University of Manchester (2026). IBM Z Student Ambassador and Mainframe Society founder. Previously at Palantir, SAP, Goldman Sachs, and Google.
Your repo. Where Refinery lives.
Every bank had the same problem.
Nobody was building the fix.
During my time in the IBM Z Student Ambassador programme, I spoke to engineers and compliance leads at financial institutions running IBM Z, across banking, insurance, and government. The pattern was consistent: AI tools were being pointed at their COBOL, and there was no independent check.IBM would certify IBM’s tools. Their vendors would certify their own work. The independent verification layer did not exist.
A compiler accepts AI-rewritten code if it is syntactically valid. It cannot tell you whether the interest calculation still means the same thing it did in 1984. That gap between syntactic validity and semantic equivalence is where silent errors live. A single removed ROUNDED keyword on a COMPUTE statement produces penny drift that compounds across millions of transactions.
Refinery meets you at your repo, where your code lives. We connect directly to your source control. No uploads, no copying files into a portal. Any change goes in: IBM Bob, GitHub Copilot, a vendor PTF, or a developer commit. A formal verdict and a signed Change Contract come out, independent of IBM and independent of your entire vendor stack.
DORA (EU, January 2025) classifies AI and third-party ICT changes as material risk requiring documented independent verification. SR 11-7 (US Federal Reserve) mandates model change governance with independent validation evidence. SS1/23 (Bank of England) requires proportionate model risk management for all material system changes. Refinery satisfies all three from a single audit run.