Team News 🎉
Today is another exciting day for Team Lightyear. We get to officially welcome our friend, and former Wise colleague, to the team full time. I’m very happy to announce that one of our earliest investors and advisors, Wander Rutgers, is joining as Chief Operating Officer.
Wander, Mihkel and I worked closely together during our time at Wise solving many problems from the operational how-do-we-move-money right through to international expansion and bringing the product to as many people as possible.
After leaving Wise, Wander joined UK fintech Plum where he spearheaded the launch of its mutual fund investment product before joining Robinhood UK, leading the business in its international expansion efforts.
I’m incredibly excited to bring Wander on board our COO. His experience and expertise will be invaluable to so many areas of the business we’re building today. At Lightyear, Wander is focused on building out the brokerage, compliance and business functions to support growth and expansion.
From investor to advisor to COO 🚀
Wander’s journey with Lightyear started during our first funding round as one of our early angel investors. With his background in product, ops and the investment world, he’s been giving us his time and support for a while, but this year he moved more into an official advisory role, helping us with business development and getting our partners set up operationally.
It’s going to be an exciting summer for us as we gear up for European launch and now is the perfect time to bolster our leadership team with this appointment.
By Martin Sokk
Martin is a lifelong product builder in the finance world having joined Wise as the first product person. Martin began working with Mihkel on the idea for Lightyear in the summer of 2020. After meeting for a coffee to catch up, they both quickly realised that they shared a strong opinion: investing in Europe is still broken.
