‘It was pure accident’: how Chase UK’s boss went from communist Poland to Wall Street banking … via linguistics
Having left the library behind, the once budding academic talks about building JP Morgan’s UK digital lender from scratchIt all started in spring 2019, in a secret office on the seventh floor of JP Morgan’s London headquarters in Canary Wharf.Tucked behind the bustling staff canteen, at the end of a corridor that snaked past the office gym and in-house doctor, future Chase UK chief executive Kuba Fast was digesting the task ahead of him: helping build a new digital bank – from scratch – for the Wall Street giant.He had been selected to join the project months earlier by fellow McKinsey alumnus Sanoke Viswanathan, who had been travelling the globe to learn from other successful digital lenders, including Fast’s former employer, Poland’s mBank.JP Morgan gave little detail about its venture, which was then known by its codename, Project Dynamo.But Fast dived headfirst into the blank-slate project.
“I agreed to join before knowing where I would live,” Fast says,Six years later, he is chief executive of Chase UK, which holds £20bn in assets, offering current accounts and savings, and most recently credit cards, to 2,5 million customers,And while the bank is still running at a loss for its Wall Street parent, Fast confirms it is aiming to break even for the first time in 2025, helping lay the groundwork for expansion into mainland Europe,“In 2025 we would like the UK business … to make money and start contributing towards defraying the cost, the investment, that we’re putting into global platform technologies,” Fast says.
JP Morgan has long toyed with the idea of expanding its Chase brand, which is one of the largest consumer banks in the US, serving nearly half of American households through online banking and 4,700 branches,Although bosses were initially put off by the prospect of costly branch networks, the rising popularity of online banks such as Monzo, Starling and Revolut – which burst on to the scene around 2015 – offered a window of opportunity,In 2021, JP Morgan became the second major US lender to enter the UK retail banking market, following Goldman Sachs, which started offering its Marcus digital savings accounts in 2018,It has been a whirlwind for Fast, who had been aiming for a lifelong career in academia and linguistics before ending up in business by “pure accident”,“Growing up, I thought of myself as a man of the letters, not a man of the numbers”, he says.
Fast was born in 1980 in Sosnowiec, Poland – a country whose communist regime was soon to crumble.“I still have a very vivid recollection of those times, like supply shortages, people standing in lines for hours and hours to buy a washing machine or meat.Or going on sign-up lists to potentially get a car five years down the road.”So when communism fell, a buzzing sense of optimism and opportunity pulled him abroad.That included Brazil – where his father had arranged for an informal student exchange – and later to the west coast of Canada, where he studied for his international baccalaureate before returning to Poland for university.
He was fascinated by sociology, and the kind of computational linguistics fuelling the AI models which are now in the process of shaking up every industry.But after deferring his PhD programme, he found himself working for McKinsey, the influential consultancy firm known as the “CEO factory” for churning out some of the biggest names in business and politics.“It was almost like being forcibly extracted from a nook in the library,” he recalls.There, he helped banks rebuild their operations after the blows of the 2007-08 crisis.And just as he made partner, he was poached by mBank, where he led the international retail division, before being pulled away to work for Chase UK.
His rise at Chase UK was accelerated by the departure of his former boss.But Fast insists he is serving Chase’s initial mission: “We want to be in multiple countries.And in each of these countries, we want to be a prominent presence: top five.”Sign up to ObservedAnalysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotionFast admits the bank is “not close” to reaching that point in the UK.But JP Morgan is so confident in its ambitions that in May 2024, it hoisted the Chase logo on top of its UK headquarters at 25 Bank Street in Canary Wharf.
Pending regulations could raise its profile further,With £20bn in assets, it is edging closer to the £25bn threshold at which it would be forced to separate consumer deposits from the rest of its investment banking operations,However, so-called ring-fencing rules being proposed by the Treasury are due to raise that threshold to £35bn,The existing thresholds have been a barrier to growth for its Goldman-backed rival Marcus, which temporarily closed to new business in 2020 to avoid hitting the threshold,While Fast says that has not yet been the case for Chase UK, the changes come at an opportune time.
“That’s absolutely vital for us … it allows us to grow.”As for the influence of the incoming Trump administration, Fast says Chase UK – like its parent bank – is braced for any potential volatility.“[JP Morgan chief executive] Jamie Dimon says that the economic and political cycle is like the weather.You need to be prepared for it, right? If you don’t have an umbrella, you’re in trouble.And we run our business in a way that we have the umbrella.
”Age 44Family Wife (Karolina Lewestam, a writer); three kids (16, 10 and six); three cats.Education United World College of the Pacific (Canada), University of Warsaw (MA, sociology), Harvard Business School (MBA).Pay Undisclosed.Last holiday City break in Madrid.Best advice he’s been given “If you’re not happy with your job, change how you behave and your environment.
If it works, problem solved.If you go too far, you may get fired, but you didn’t like the job anyway, so is that really that bad?”Biggest career mistake “With hindsight, I could have taken more risks earlier in my career.”Word he overuses “Amazing.”How he relaxes Crash courses in niche hobbies – “one of my recent ones was watchmaking”.
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