Bishop says the group is doing work in Japan, South Africa, Europe and in the United States, all similar to the "transformation" approach he led at Wachovia.

"Firms are asking us how to quickly drive service orientation on a legacy platform, how to start moving toward a real-time infrastructure, how to take out large costs when building a strategic platform," he says. "We've been through the wars and have the scars and the wounds from those wars to say, don’t go this way, go that way."

In addition to consulting, Adaptivity is running an "innovation lab" in which it works with end-user firms and vendors to help build missing middleware components or connectors between different products. "Vendors get stuck in their silos, they can’t see the forest behind the trees, and end users are asking for help with things like managing service levels or reporting and billing for variable usage," Bishop says. He hopes to license the new technology back to the software companies. "It’s our intellectual property to solve a problem, but I don’t want this to become a software company," he says. Adaptivity also plans to create a social community for Wall Street IT executives.

Happily, Bishop reports that working for himself has been beneficial to his health. "When you’re driving a lot of change and strategy and transformation [in a large corporation] you age fast," he says. "I saw a picture projecting what Hillary and Obama will look like in four years if they win the presidency. I was just like that, my hair was thining, bags under my eyes. My blood pressure had peaked at 160 over 120, it’s now back to 119 over 78. So maybe I could help share knowledge with people, and keep their blood pressure from going through the roof."