Chuck Teixeira, Class of 1996
The MBA in Accounting program provided me a technical foundation in both management and accounting skills that I still use to this day.
I completed the program when it was Rotman’s MBA in Accounting, and joined my co-op firm, PwC, upon graduation. Working with PwC allowed me to travel and try my hand in many industries including oil and gas, mining, retail, and financial services. It was working on financial services clients that I realized that I really enjoyed working with investment banks. I left PwC to join Lehman Brothers as the CAO of the EMEA Equities division. This was an exciting time and a period of hyper growth in the industry. Going through the bankruptcy of Lehman, and the integration with Nomura was an extreme challenge but the skills I learned from doing my MBA in Accounting (the now MMPA program) and the experience at PwC of always being dropped in the deep end with a new client, new type of project, and new city where I had to assess my new surroundings and strategically build a structured plan allowed me to lead my division through a difficult period. After joining Barclays and UBS for some time, I landed at HSBC as the overall CAO and Head of Transformation for the Global Banking and Markets division which comprised one-third of the entire bank, where I led the digital and data transformation across 65 countries.
I left banking in 2019 to start my own enterprise software company called WCKD RZR. I grew increasingly frustrated that there were no easy-to-use software tools that allowed an organization to identify all the data they had globally, catalogue it and then ensure access to the data was always in compliance with all the ever-changing data sharing, privacy and ethics rules around the world. Our mission at WCKD RZR is to help the world unlock the potential of their data.
The MBA in Accounting program provided me a technical foundation in both management and accounting skills that I still use to this day. Being a co-op program, it allowed me to learn classroom skills which I was able to apply in a real workplace environment, then return to class and build upon those skills, allowing me to embed and reinforce those learnings so that I can call upon them throughout my career.