About

QBRS Labs is the research and advisory practice of Robert Jeffs.

Robert is a systems engineer with more than thirty years in systems engineering and business automation development, principally on safety-critical aerospace and defense programs, and five years of applied work in AI development and the cryptocurrency industry. His work spans model-based systems engineering, enterprise architecture, and graph-based knowledge representation. He operates a production quantitative trading system governed by the disciplines described in his published research.

He holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University and an MSc in Major Programme Management from the University of Oxford — both taken deliberately outside the United States, on the view that a framework worth anything has to survive contact with more than one regulator.

Where this is going

The framework published here rests on a principle borrowed from certification: the party that verifies an assurance case is not the party that built the system. In aviation that party exists, and has for decades. In agentic finance it does not.

Someone will build it — criteria that can be applied consistently, assessors trained to apply them, and a finding an institution can put in front of a supervisor. The work here is the groundwork for that: the framework first, then the assessment practice that tests it against real deployments, then the criteria that fall out of doing it enough times to know what holds.

That is a long road and it is stated here as an intention rather than an offering. Today the practice advises institutions on assurance and governance for AI systems in regulated finance, one deployment at a time, and publishes what it learns.

Contact: robert.j.jeffs@qbrs-labs.com.