One company brain.
Governed by design.
FundTap runs invoice finance for small businesses across New Zealand and Australia with a team of 10. Possibl built them a governed knowledge system on Claude, wired into their live business systems through custom connectors on Azure.
A 10-person team funding businesses across two countries.
FundTap has provided invoice finance to small businesses since 2010, funding invoices in hours rather than weeks from its base in Nelson. Founder and Director Matt Peacey built the modern FundTap on that model in 2018. A team of 10 runs the whole operation: credit, sales, customer success, and the platform itself.
That model only works if everyone can act on the same knowledge. What the credit policy actually says. How the brand speaks. What changed in a customer conversation last Tuesday. In most small companies that knowledge lives in people's heads and a dozen disconnected systems. FundTap wanted it in one place, kept accurate, and available to every team member through Claude.
The FundTap team, Nelson, New Zealand
AI is only as good as what it knows. And who can change what it knows.
Give a language model your company documents and it will answer confidently, whether the documents are current or not. Let everyone edit those documents and your single source of truth stops being single. Let an AI agent write to them unsupervised and it will quietly rewrite your strategy to match last week's sales calls.
FundTap needed the opposite: a knowledge system where facts about the business stay accurate, strategy stays deliberate, and every change is reviewed by a human before it becomes canon. Not a policy document asking people to behave. An architecture that enforces it.
A generic chatbot fed a folder of documents cannot make that distinction. It has one write permission, everyone shares it, and there is no mechanism to stop a well-meaning edit or a confident hallucination from becoming the new truth. FundTap needed governance built into the platform, not a set of house rules everyone was expected to remember.
The Brain: curated knowledge, one writer.
The Brain is a structured knowledge base on FundTap's SharePoint, loaded into every Claude session the team runs. Phase 1 shipped 34 canonical files split into two deliberately separate types: company reality, the observable facts of the business, and company strategy, the positions FundTap has chosen. Reality never silently overwrites strategy. If the market moves, a human decides whether the strategy moves with it.
One person, the Steward, holds write access to the canonical layers. Everyone else, human or AI, proposes. Suggested changes queue as signal cards for the Steward to approve or reject in a weekly review, so the Brain improves every week without ever drifting on its own. A capture loop feeds that queue automatically, drawing signals from team conversations and a scheduled weekly digest of activity in FundTap's systems.
Observable facts about the business: products, pricing, processes, customers. Updated when the evidence changes.
Deliberate positions: brand voice, credit policy intent, market focus. Updated only by decision, never by drift.
Proposed changes from the team and from live data, queued for human review before anything becomes canonical.
Custom MCP servers, one authenticated gateway.
Knowledge about the business is not the same as data in the business. The Brain holds curated insight. Live data stays where it lives, in HubSpot, ClickUp, Xero, and Microsoft 365, and Claude reaches it on demand through the Model Context Protocol.
Off-the-shelf connectors could not meet FundTap's governance requirements, so Possibl built the connector layer: four custom MCP servers behind a single authenticating gateway. Every request signs in through FundTap's own Microsoft Entra ID, so access follows the company's identity system, not a shared API key. Together the connectors expose more than 50 tools for querying deals, tasks, meeting notes, mail, calendars, and accounts.
Governance is built into the connectors themselves. Every connector is read-only by default. Write capability exists on a single, deliberate path, and switching it on needs sign-off from both the Steward and the founder. The Xero connector goes further: it is locked to a single authorised user at identity level, so financial data through Claude is never exposed to the wider team.
Production infrastructure, not a laptop script.
The whole connector layer runs on Azure Container Apps in Australia East: one public gateway container, an authorisation broker, and four internal-only connector containers that cannot be reached except through the gateway. Secrets live in Azure Key Vault, never in code or configuration. The containers run under least-privilege managed identities. FundTap runs lean, so Possibl built the environment and operates it on their behalf.
The result is a connector platform with one front door, one identity system, and no shared API keys on anyone's machine.
Four layers of enforcement, in order.
The design principle behind the whole system: instructions are guidance, architecture is control. An instruction file can be ignored by a sufficiently determined agent. Permissions cannot. So the controls that matter are enforced in the platform, in order of strength.
SharePoint permissions
Folder-level access control. Only the Steward can write to the canonical knowledge layers.
Claude Code hooks and deny rules
Session-level write restrictions that stop non-Steward writes to protected folders.
MCP capability restrictions
Connectors are read-only by default. Writes exist on one approved path only.
Instruction files
CLAUDE.md guides behaviour in every session. It is the last line of defence, never the first.
Agents propose. Only the Steward writes. The architecture enforces what matters.Design principle, FundTap AI Brain
Handed over, and running.
Phase 1 was delivered and formally handed over to FundTap in June 2026, with an operations manual, a Steward run manual, and a troubleshooting guide. The team now uses Claude as its working interface to company knowledge: grounded in the curated Brain, reaching into live systems through the governed connectors, and improving weekly through the Steward's review.
FundTap's own Steward runs the system day to day, and a 12-month roadmap maps where the platform can go next: an always-on scheduled runtime, deeper capture, and an evaluation framework that measures the Brain's accuracy over time.
The Steward's weekly review is the engine. Around 15 signal cards get a decision each week, 98 since day one. Once a piece of work is promoted into the Brain, everyone else can build on it without another meeting. When FundTap promoted its customer personas, that work flowed straight into website and marketing collateral.
Picture a Tuesday. A customer success rep gets a question about a credit exception for a construction client renewing their facility. Before the Brain, that meant a message to Matt or a dig through old email threads. Now it means asking Claude, which answers from the current credit policy, not last year's version, and flags the one open question a human still needs to weigh in on.
“The Fundtap brain has collapsed the need for process and policy. Team members can instantly get the answers needed or produce on-brand collateral in minutes. The Brain surfaces information conflicts across the team forcing us to understand ourselves better. The learning loop compounds value. The AI powered brain is the most significant single change in Fundtap, ever.”Matt Peacey · Founder & Director, FundTap
“Once work is promoted into the brain, it's instantly usable by everyone else, no meeting required.”Helena Howley · Steward of the Brain, FundTap