Upgrade Appoints New COO, Former Best Egg CEO Anticipates Improving Environment for Fintechs

Upgrade, a neobank that offers various credit and savings products to its customers, has appointed a new Chief Operating Officer (COO). Jeffrey Meiler, former founder and CEO of Best Egg, has joined the Fintech to apply his decades of experience in lending cards and payments.

In a release, Meiler said he was excited to join the company and has long admired Upgrade’s various products and value created for consumers.

“I’m eager to contribute to the company’s continued success.”

Before Best Egg – which he led for ten years, Mieler was at Barclays, where he led the company’s US near-prime credit card efforts and developed the strategy for the U.S. card business.

Upgrade founder and CEO Renaud Laplanche said Meiler shares their commitment to delivering credit responsibly.

CI connected with Meiler and asked him what he expects to accomplish at Upgrade and if he was focusing on new products or scaling existing ones.

“My initial focus will be on personal loans and operations strategy,” said Meiler. “The personal loan product is fairly mature but still growing nicely, and I will be making sure that product, marketing, credit and operations work together to maximize the opportunity set. That includes developing new variants of the personal loan product, and also making sure credit performance, underwriting and servicing are all optimized. From an operations strategy standpoint, I will be focusing on continuing to drive loan performance, operations efficiency and automation, and the growing use of AI in every aspect of operations.”

As he founded a consumer lending platform, we asked him how his experience at Best Egg will help him accomplish his goals. We asked him what Best Egg got right and where the company fell short.

“I think every company has strengths and weaknesses. By joining Upgrade, I bring 30 years of experience building and growing financial products, not just at Best Egg but also at Barclays and Citi. Best Egg has particularly strong credit performance and operational excellence; Barclays is strong in product marketing, particularly with credit cards.  I will be bringing all of the industry experience I’ve gained to Upgrade and work hard to make this high performing company even better.”

So, where does he see the most opportunity for an Upgrade? Meiler believes that there are opportunities in existing products, including cards, BNPL, mobile banking, and lending. But the more significant opportunity may be to “continue to develop the Upgrade “ecosystem” and help our customers benefit from multiple products within that ecosystem.” Meiler said that each new product introduced and each new data point collected from their customers helps them to serve them better and deliver more value.

With the Trump administration taking over the federal government, we asked his opinion about what he anticipates for the Fintech sector.

“I think, in general, the investment climate improved after the elections, and you saw a nice bump in Fintech stocks over the last 2 months. The regulatory climate is also improving, with incoming banking regulators seeming more in favor of innovation and bank-fintech partnerships.”



Sponsored Links by DQ Promote

 

 

 
Send this to a friend