Auto Alpha AdvisoryFive industries. Four countries. One pattern.
I’m Matt Owen — a chartered accountant who writes the production code, not just the advice. I walk into unfamiliar environments, work out what matters, and build what’s missing.
Every pivot meant learning a new domain fast and delivering before I had permission to be the expert. The through-line never changed: making a business legible to whoever has to trust it — regulators first, then search engines, now the AI engines that decide who gets named. I write more about the pattern across those pivots — and where I think this is heading — at mattowen.xyz.
- JHB
- LDN
- NYC
- MLB
- CPT
The FoundationJohannesburg · London
I started where most South African CAs start — in audit. At KPMG I spent three years pulling apart complex financial structures: 80-entity corporate groups, Investec and Nedbank lending books, cross-border restructurings. I led teams of five to ten across Johannesburg and London. It taught me how businesses actually work — not the theory, the plumbing.
The PivotNew York · Cape Town
A secondment in New York, then blockchain arrived. I saw what most accountants missed — not a speculative asset, but a new architecture for financial systems. I went all in: built a community of investors and developers, and spent the 2017–2018 ICO boom advising clients on what to build and, more importantly, what not to. Most who ignored the second answer regretted it within months.
The StartupJohannesburg · Melbourne
At an energy-technology company I saw that countries with high smart-meter penetration were sitting on untapped data value. I pivoted our product from energy trading to energy data, wrote the whitepaper, and got us into a competitive international accelerator in Australia. When my co-founder pulled out, I ran the whole programme solo — architecture, product design, daily investor pitches. COVID killed the traction, but building from zero changed how I work.
The OperatorCape Town · Remote
I joined a startup as the fourth employee and left as Financial Director of a fifty-person company. In between, I designed a new finance product inside a major bank's existing infrastructure — first conversation to first loan in six months, scaling the pipeline from five to 250-plus clients a month. I built the financial model that became the engineering spec for the company's automated platform, so the business could scale without scaling headcount.
The BuilderCape Town
Today I build AI systems that do real work. At a $100M crypto fund I automated my own role — replacing hours of daily manual research with AI pipelines I designed and wrote. Now, at Auto Alpha Advisory, I build the agents that do the work, not just advise on it. The pattern across every chapter is the same: find the bottleneck, prototype a fix, prove it with real data, automate it.
The reader changed
For most of my career the outside reader was a regulator or a search engine. Now it is increasingly an AI engine — and that shift is measured, not hypothetical. Roughly 48% of Google searches now return an AI Overview, and when one appears organic click-through can fall by as much as 61%. The crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not execute JavaScript, so a site that only renders in the browser is invisible to them. A Princeton team quantified what wins instead — statistics gained +33% visibility, an attributed expert quote +43%, and citing sources up to +115% for lower-ranked pages — concluding that “GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses” (Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” KDD 2024).
The same standard, on my own work
An auditor’s craft is making a set of facts legible and defensible to an outside reader working on fixed rules. GEO is the same craft for a new reader — the AI engines. So I hold Auto Alpha to the read I sell: our own site scores 88/100 on the engine (95/100 SEO, 84/100 GEO, 2026-07-07); the AI Visibility Tracker runs on our own tenant; and what I’ve built is real, not slideware — the audit engine (audit.autoalphaadvisory.co.za) live today, and Komply, a compliance OS, in active build. I don’t recommend a standard I don’t pass myself.
Prototype, then scale.
Every system I build starts as a working manual prototype — not a slide deck. Prove the concept on real data, then automate it. The Excel model that ran at 95% accuracy. The research workflow that became an AI pipeline. Proof first, investment second.
One person, not a committee.
You deal with me — the person who does the strategy, writes the code, and trains your team. No project managers, no handoffs, no telephone game.
Strategic conviction.
I'll tell you what not to build. I've halted fund allocations, blocked hires that would have burned runway, and advised against launches the numbers didn't support. If AI isn't the right answer for your business, I'll say so.
Measurable outcomes.
Every engagement starts with clear KPIs. Twenty hours a month reclaimed for a finance team. A pipeline scaled from five to 250-plus clients. If we can't measure the ROI, we don't build it.
Thirty minutes, no pitch — an honest conversation about where AI fits, and where it doesn’t. Or start with the free read first.
hello@autoalphaadvisory.co.za· Cape Town, South Africa