Over the course of a distinguished career, Andy Mielczarek has earned a reputation as a free thinker and a problem solver. Early accountancy experience with Deloitte saw him conducting audits across Siberia, in the wilderness years of Boris Yeltsin’s Russian presidency. By the age of 26, he was head of brokerage operations at the tech-oriented Charles Schwab, before a stint at credit card and loan specialist MBNA. Senior leadership and retail banking positions at M&S Bank, then HSBC, soon followed, rounding out a professional trajectory that has consistently married evolving technology with finance.
This experience has shaped much of Mr Mielczarek’s thinking in his current position, as chief executive and co-founder of UK digital challenger bank, Chetwood Financial. “A core belief in traditional banking is that banking is a distribution business where you ‘acquire’ customers through loss-leading ‘teaser’ rates, then make money later from customer inertia as they revert to worse rates later on, or through ‘cross sales’. But one of the guiding thoughts at Chetwood Financial is: what if we don’t do that? Why don’t we actually just try and build a product that’s profitable on its own, and is the best rate we can do at the time for that customer?” says Mr Mielczarek.
