About Cairn River
A small UK software company, building one product for the long term.
Cairn River Ltd is registered in England and run by its founder. We are not venture-backed and have no plans to be. We answer our own support email, and the person who replies is the person who wrote the software.
Who are we
Spencer Clark - Founder
Spencer has spent nearly thirty years building software for UK financial services, most of it wealth management platforms: domains where the regulator eventually asks what you did and why.
In 2012 he co-founded Wealth Dynamix and was its CTO as it grew past a hundred people. He later founded Portemis and designed a product that Wealth Dynamix went on to acquire, then rejoined as Senior System Architect to countinue building CLMi their latest SaaS platform.
Since July 2026 he has been building Cairn full time. It is the product he wished existed every time a firm he worked with was asked to show, months later, that the right process had been followed.
More at spencerclark.dev, or find him on GitHub, LinkedIn and X.
Why Cairn exists
Important work gets done. The proof of it does not survive.
A great deal of regulated work involves judgement rather than rules, changes slowly, and is reviewed later by other people: a regulator, an auditor, a board, a client. Existing tools force that work into one of two shapes. Workflow engines automate, branch, escalate and optimise. CRMs treat everything as a customer lifecycle. Both add pressure and complexity that the work does not need.
Cairn is a third option: slow, explicit, manual and evidence-led. It records what was done, why, and when, against the procedure that was in force at the time, so a team can show the process they followed months or years later. It does not optimise work, automate outcomes or tell anyone what to do next.
How we decide
The default answer is no.
Cairn is meant to stay calm, finished and sustainable, something one small company can run indefinitely without stress or expansion. Every decision is measured against that, and we would rather tell you our rules now than surprise you later.
Every customer gets the same product
No customer-specific behaviour, no bespoke variants, no custom features. If it cannot benefit everyone equally, it is not built.
No knobs
Configuration surface is cost, for you and for us. A feature that needs a setting to be safe is a feature we have not finished thinking about.
Recording, never deciding
Cairn records that something happened. It never decides what someone should do next, and it never judges whether you are compliant. People do.
Adopted, not implemented
Self-serve, with no setup fees, onboarding projects or consultancy. If a procedure cannot be used without help, we treat the product as incomplete.
Get in touch
Write to a person.
Questions, early access, or a real story about the last time someone asked you for evidence: [email protected]. Every message is read and answered by the founder.
Cairn River Ltd is registered in England. Our terms, privacy policy and cookie policy are published on this site.