We are excited to announce the appointment of Ryszard Jedrzejewski as our Chief Operating Officer!

We sat down with RJ for a quick chat to learn more about him and why he wanted to be a #knowitall

1. Welcome to Know-it! Tell us a b-it about yourself

I have been fortunate over my career to have worked for lots of great companies, such as Experian, National Australia Bank, GE Capital, a fintech start-up business (Castlight Financial in Glasgow), Clydesdale Bank, M&G Investments, and a management consultancy firm. I have performed a broad range of roles from building and launching B2B and B2C products, developing strategies and working on change transformation products; along with being chief dishwasher unloader at Castlight, my most treasured position!

You may have noted my name has lots of consonants, very few vowels and ends in ‘ski’ so I have a Polish father, English mother and born in sunny Essex!

I have lived in Suffolk, Essex, Yorkshire and spent time in Australia and the US, and moved to Glasgow around 15-years ago, and absolutely love being here – except on some dreich days!  

Outside of work, I attempt to keep fit and get to the gym but not as often as I like, I run 5k or 10k runs 3-times a week and enter a few events such as Glasgow 10k most years. I am an avid footie fan and follow Leeds United and Legia Warsaw, and apologies for this but I do support Eng-er-land and Poland, but always want Scotland to do well.

My partner Yvonne and I really enjoy traveling and getting away into Europe when we can, and I have an incredible weakness for Almond Croissants so one day maybe I should write a guide on the best croissants in Glasgow, as I have eaten that many!  

Finally, something not many people know about me, is that I played in an accordion orchestra that won a UK championship event many years ago. The back story is that I didn’t want to play this instrument, but it’s one of the national instruments in Poland, and my dad was keen for one of his sons to play this. So being the youngest, I drew the short straw and to my surprise I was pretty good at it and passed loads of grades (similar to piano) but it gave me zero street cred in my teenage years.

2. What first interested you to join Know-it?

There is something exciting and special about being part of a fintech start up, and joining a business that has a clear mission to ‘help businesses get paid on time by taking away the hassle of checking, chasing and collecting payments through a tech platform so that business owners can focus on what they’re good at – running and growing their businesses’.

Whilst I have worked in corporates, the most enjoyable time of my career was at Castlight where I was employee number 2 and it was amazing to help grow and scale the business.  So, when I started thinking about what I wanted next, the #1 criteria was get back into fintech, #2, find a company with a great purpose and #3, be able to use my skills / expertise to make a difference. After my first conversation with Lynne and Chris I felt all of my criteria had been ticked.     

3. What were your first impressions of the platform and how it will help businesses?

The platform is brilliant, it’s innovative and contains great time saving features for SMEs to take care of the financial side of their businesses –  being able to check new customers before they offer credit terms or extend these, keeping on top of what’s happening to their customers and their customers’ end-customers, so they can assess whether events may impact their ability to get paid and take early action, and finally having the ability to Collect payments through Darcey Quigley to better manage their cashflow – having all of this capability in one easy to use platform simplifies, reduces the time and cost of getting paid for the services SMEs provide.

4. What existing skills & experience do you hope to transfer over to your new role at Know-it?

Aside from my excellent dishwasher emptying skills, my career experiences mean I have a toolkit of skills that I can utilise from product innovation, building, launching, running products, developing business strategies, defining business architectures and operating models.

I really enjoy working with customers to understand customer and market needs and through tech solutions solve these challenges.

I like working with people and take a collaborative approach to leadership. I see my role as being purpose driven, working in an agile manner, ensuring our teams are set up for success and any blockers get removed; along with building a great workplace culture, and developing our teams and individuals to be their best, enjoy what they do and progress their career.  

5. What are your thoughts on the growing tech scenes across Scotland and what would you like to see happen in the industry?

Scotland has lots of great businesses and is a vibrant hub for fintech firms across industry sectors with a great talent pool of graduates through to those having been around a bit longer.

Fintech Scotland is an active community and by plugging ourselves into this more, we can make further business connections to take Know-it forward and engage with businesses where there are synergies and opportunities to grow or utilise other tech solutions in our platform.    

6. What’s next for Know-it?

Smash the UK and be famous for helping SMEs get paid on time, manage their creditors and improve their cashflow using our platform and be #1 in market, then after this, it’s global domination as the issue of overdue invoices, late payments are a worldwide issue we can solve.

We have unique capabilities through Darcey Quigley that we can further expand, and being a data driven business there are opportunities to spin up new services and utilise Generative AI.

One thing is for sure is, we are at the beginning of a journey to take the business forward!