In Washington DC in October, Cezary Stypulkowski reminisced with Ana Botín about how they once both featured in Euromoney’s list of the top 50 young financial leaders. Thirty years on, Stypulkowski remains a central figure in Poland’s banking sector and Botín is firmly in charge of Banco Santander, Spain’s global banking champion.
But Stypulkowski has just embarked on a new and characteristically ambitious direction, in line with his enduring hunger for banking-sector disruption.
He has been best known, during the past 15 years, as chief executive of Commerzbank subsidiary mBank, Poland’s second biggest privately owned lender after Santander Bank Polska. MBank’s digital-led retail-banking expansion has won much respect locally – and internationally. Euromoney named mBank best digital bank across the central and eastern European region in 2018. That respect is also evident in where mBank alumni have gone. Kuba Fast, CEO of JPMorgan’s new digital retail bank Chase UK, helped lead mBank’s retail push during the 2010s, for example.
Now, Stypulkowski’s arrival at Pekao SA in autumn 2024 – after his departure from mBank in the summer – has kicked off what might be the biggest bank transformation project in Poland, if not across central and eastern Europe.
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