Finance-trained. Data-fluent. Rare combination.
I’m Darryl Kletz. I started DataSkye in 2022 to close a gap I’d seen repeatedly across 25 years in finance and data: CFOs who cannot trust their numbers, and consultancies who cannot speak finance.
Three principles I operate by.
Every engagement I run is shaped by these. They are not marketing frameworks. They are what I have learned produces results worth paying for.
Financial credibility is the multiplier.
A brilliant dashboard built by someone who cannot challenge the CFO on whether the numbers make sense is just a pretty picture. I can sit in a finance meeting, understand the conversation, and build the system that answers the next question. Most data consultants cannot do one of those. Doing both is the multiplier.
Systems before tools.
Tools are downstream of the decision to have one. The real work is designing the system. What data matters, how it flows, who owns it, how it evolves. I start engagements with the system, not the software. If the system is wrong, no tool will fix it.
Handover is the real deliverable.
Most consulting engagements end badly because the client inherits a black box. The dashboard works on day one. Six months later, nobody remembers why a number is calculated that way. I design every engagement so your team ends up more capable, not more dependent. Documentation is not an afterthought. It is part of the product.
Twenty-five years across finance, technology, and data leadership.
Investec → financial systems design → co-founded a telco → data and analytics leadership. Each chapter shaped how I think about the next. Below is the reasoning.
I started at Investec in 1999 as an articled clerk, rotating through Treasury, Risk, and Finance. Qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 2002 on a first-time pass, then stayed on for another two years in Mezzanine Debt and Structured Finance. Five years at Investec taught me that financial rigour and commercial judgement are different skills, and that the people who had both were the ones who got listened to.
In 2004, before leaving Investec, I founded MerchantVision, an import and distribution business supplying outdoor recreational products, jewellery, and ceramics to South African retailers. I ran it alongside the next two roles. From 2005 to 2006 I was a business analyst at Treehouse, designing a private equity reporting system and programming VBA and SQL tools that automated Rand Merchant Bank’s Reserve Bank reporting. From 2006 to 2008 I was Project Financial Controller at Medallist Holdings, a Macquarie Bank subsidiary, designing accounting and reporting systems to meet Australian parent-company standards while running as a standalone South African operation. The common thread across all three: systems and reporting, built for businesses where the data was not going to build itself.
In 2009 I co-founded Telstream, a pan-African telecommunications business built on a regulatory opportunity nobody else had noticed. I spent six years building it, before negotiating a trade sale to a Dutch acquirer in 2015. The lesson from that chapter was not entrepreneurial. It was operational. Building something from zero taught me that execution quality matters more than strategic cleverness. Most businesses fail on execution, not vision.
From 2015 to 2019 I ran Techlage Africa, an independent consulting practice in data visualisation and analytics reporting. The largest engagement was a two-year contract with Nedbank Group Technology’s PMO, delivering an automated dashboard reporting platform for one of South Africa’s largest banks. Seeing a major bank’s technology operation from the inside clarified something I had suspected. Big companies buy the same tools as small ones, but use maybe 10% of the capability. The gap is in implementation, not technology.
In 2020 I moved to Malta and joined Tipico as HR Insight Manager, then internally transferred to Commercial Finance Manager in 2021. iGaming taught me about operating at speed. Hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, regulatory pressure from every direction, and finance teams that had to make decisions with data that was usually 24 hours stale. I started building the tooling to fix that, which is how I ended up with both hands on Power BI.
From 2022 to 2025 I was at Makosi, starting as BI Specialist and promoted to VP Data and Analytics in 2023. I built the analytics function from greenfield, set the technical standards, and worked with PE-backed portfolio companies whose finance teams were producing reports the data could not support, and whose data teams were producing output the finance leaders could not interpret. The problem was always the same: credibility gap between the two functions. That is where the DataSkye thesis crystallised.
DataSkye started in 2022 alongside Makosi and became the primary practice in 2025. The positioning is simple. I bring financial credibility and technical capability to the same engagement. Most consultancies offer one. Very few offer both. That is what serious buyers have been missing.
What I bring to an engagement.
DataSkye is a one-person firm by design. That means you are hiring me directly, not an account manager who briefs a junior team. Below is what I actually do.
Financial fluency
Chartered Accountant since 2002. 25+ years across structured finance, financial systems design, operational finance, and scaling-company environments. I can sit in a finance meeting, interpret the conversation, and challenge the numbers when they do not add up.
Microsoft Fabric and Power BI
Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer certified. I build semantic models, DAX measures, and Power BI reports that hold up under scrutiny. I have worked with Dataflows Gen1 migrations, calculation groups, medallion architectures, and incremental refresh patterns at scale.
Sector-specific experience
Hands-on experience across PE portfolios, family offices, iGaming operators, finance teams, HR teams, and scaling startups. Each has its own data patterns, regulatory constraints, and commercial rhythms. I know what signal looks like in each.
Leadership and handover
I led data teams at Makosi and have built DataSkye engagements across the full spectrum, from focused project work to ongoing advisory. Every engagement ends with your team more capable, not more dependent. I design for handover from day one.
How I work, where I’m based.
DataSkye operates from Malta. Small enough that everyone in the regulated-industry ecosystem knows each other, English-language business, EU legal framework, and a regulatory environment for iGaming and finance that has moved faster than most of Europe. It is a good base for serving clients across EU and UK.
As for how I work: I prefer async over meetings when async does the job, I document everything so institutional knowledge survives my handover, and I respond to emails within 24 hours because the fastest way to lose a CFO’s trust is to make them wait.
Now you know the person behind the engagement.
If what I described sounds like the shape of advisor you need, let’s have a conversation. I will reply within 24 hours.