Ed Harycki CEO of Swift Financial
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The various hats that he’s worn throughout his career, along with his vision and passion, set him apart from the typical financial services executive. While the bottom-line orientation is there, Harycki achieves success by thinking from the customer’s perspective and building companies from there. Harycki’s passion was first seen in music. While in junior high school in suburban Baltimore, he started a band that was performing professionally within a year.
This also was Harycki’s introduction to management. In addition to playing a mean guitar, he was responsible for bookings, signings and most importantly, making a profit. In addition to playing cover tunes, Harycki was also very interested in songwriting and recording. One of his songs was entered into a national songwriting contest sponsored by a radio station in Washington, D.C., and was selected to be on the compilation album. With the winnings from this contest, Harycki was able to create a computerized recording studio to further his recording interests. While in college, Harycki moved on to play with a popular local country-rock band which opened as lead act at the Preakness Stakes, playing to more than 50,000 in the infield. Harycki’s drive to please the audience – the customers – has remained with him throughout his career.
As an undergraduate at Loyola College, he studied management-information systems. At the time, Harycki saw that banks were hiring people with computer skills, but he realized that M.B.A.s were the ones with real opportunities for growth. That prospect led him to Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where in addition to sharpening his marketing skills, he continued managing a few musical artists on the side.
In fact, until three weeks before graduation Harycki was planning to enter the music and recording industry with a music agency famous for working with the likes of Milli Vanilli, New Kids on the Block and Vanilla Ice. But timing wasn’t in his favor and all three acts began falling apart. Ed decided it was better to head in a different direction. Most of the typical jobs M.B.A.s land after graduation had already been filled by spring, so as an interim measure following grad school, he joined his brother in developing a group of high-end coffee shops in the Baltimore area. This stint gave him an appreciation for the needs of small businesses – an appreciation that he maintains today.
In 2000, Harycki entered banking, in the corporate finance area of MBNA. His creativity and entrepreneurial spirit came into play as he put together complex financial transactions that others thought could not be done.
For international experience, Harycki joined Barclays Capital which sent him to the UK. Eventually, Barclays wanted him for its credit-card division, but he felt that an established bank could not embrace technology or be adequately responsive to customer needs in terms of services and options.
So, after taking a leave of absence and obtaining funding, he established and served as chief executive officer of Accucard, the UK’s first independent credit-card company. This released him from the dogma of conventional banks. Ahead of his time, he offered cardholders personalized programs, with choices: lower interest rates, cash back and various service options. By capitalizing on the economies of the Internet, he was able to pass savings along to customers. The notion of applying similar approaches to the small-business market began percolating in his head.
After selling Accucard to Lloyds, Harycki studied film-making in London, for his own satisfaction, and began making shorts. As the director, he learned to visualize from everyone’s point of view and to quickly create solutions – the shots.
Yet Harycki still had a story to tell and decided to apply his ability to envision and create to small-business banking. He returned to MBNA as chief executive of the business-lending division in 2004. He was quite successful, doubling the unit’s profits during his two-year tenure. However, Harycki was unable to overcome big-bank static inertia and to truly innovate.
Bank of America’s 2006 acquisition of MBNA gave Harycki the opportunity to create a new type of financial-services company. And he did so from scratch, like creating a song.
With a team of like-minded banking veterans who shared an entrepreneurial spirit, he created Swift Financial to exclusively serve the small business market.
Launched in May 2007, Swift Financial quickly developed a business model to fully utilize technology to provide products that are designed to meet the needs of small business owners while dramatically changing how these products are priced and serviced. Remote deposit, quick loan decisions, personal-relationship managers and elimination of nuisance fees have quickly established Swift Financial as an attractive alternative to traditional banking. Swift Financial was even recently certified by J.D. Powers and Associates for customer service excellence, something that none of the largest national banks can claim. While most CEOs would be proud of this accomplishment, Harycki says that this is merely a nice place to start.
Harycki still enjoys music, and plays as much as he can. And he appreciates the parallels between a band and Swift Financial: the collaboration, the energy, the flexibility and the strong desire to please the audience and customers.
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