Charley Zhao
Fintech Product, Strategy & Operations · MBA Candidate · Berkeley Haas '27
Experience
Senior Consultant
Strategy & Transactions · 2025
PREVIOUS
- Led enterprise platform migration across 8 business units for 1,900+ automated workflows, building executive dashboards and weekly ops reviews that reduced operational complexity by 20%
- Drove competitive positioning for 20+ banking technology pursuits ($500K-$25M+ deal sizes), evaluating enterprise fintech software platforms and synthesizing customer pain points into differentiated value propositions for prospective clients
- Designed operating model for Deloitte's account leadership function, partnering with 40+ senior leaders across Audit, Advisory, Consulting, and Tax to define scalable frameworks for portfolio growth and succession planning
Consultant
Strategy & Analytics · 2023 – 2025
PREVIOUS
- Developed performance reporting for banking transformation program involving 120+ stakeholders, defining KPIs across delivery and risk dimensions to increase executive visibility, triage blockers, and maintain velocity
- Designed testing optimization initiative with quantified business case, building weekly dashboards tracking QA efficiency metrics across 7 workstreams and quantifying $3.2M in cost avoidance to secure C-suite buy-in
- Built go-live readiness playbook for business-critical platform cutover, creating runbooks and rollout checklists enabling zero-downtime migration serving 1M+ customers
- Coordinated governance across 20+ Audit, Risk, Compliance, and engineering stakeholders, establishing decision forums and escalation paths to align regulatory requirements with program execution
- Co-authored digital banking whitepaper defining strategic imperatives for next-generation platforms, synthesizing market and trend analysis to forecast banking industry evolution
- Architected long-term technology roadmap for microservices transformation, facilitating 20+ discovery workshops with senior IT stakeholders to evaluate integration with 45 third-party enterprise applications
Analyst
Strategy & Analytics · 2021 – 2023
PREVIOUS
- Developed 3-year customer acquisition strategy for nonprofit small business lender, analyzing SBA disbursement data and lending gaps across 50 states to prioritize high-opportunity markets
- Built business case for $24M banking modernization by mapping 300+ legacy applications to identify integration bottlenecks, prioritizing 170+ features into a 2-year roadmap that secured C-suite sign-off
- Served as product owner for cloud banking integration layer, querying Azure DevOps data to track sprint velocity and surface bottlenecks, managing backlog prioritization across 40+ systems and 100+ APIs
- Developed business case for mobile banking platform, translating strategic objectives into 60 prioritized features with projected deployment to 800K+ customers and $3M incremental annual revenue
- Conducted 40+ executive discovery sessions with senior management, translating insights into recommendations that shaped multi-year digital transformation vision
Venture & Leadership
Berkeley Student Credit Union
Founder
CURRENT
- Pursuing a California credit union charter to launch a digital-native institution serving consumer banking products for UC Berkeley's 45,000+ students and sponsor bank infrastructure for fintech startup partners
- Developing initial product demo with AI prototyping tools to validate demand for consumer banking and sponsor bank offerings
Haas FinTech Club
VP of Careers
CURRENT
- Driving industry engagement strategy by identifying target companies, conducting outreach to fintech leaders, and securing partnerships for career programming serving 100+ full-time and evening/weekend MBA students
Skills
Strategy
25%
Operations
25%
Analytics
20%
Product
15%
Technical
15%
Education
UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business
Master of Business Administration
CURRENT
2025 – Present
Carnegie Mellon University
Bachelor of Science, Information Systems · Minor in Human-Computer Interaction
PREVIOUS
Contact
EMAIL
charleyzhao@mba.berkeley.edu
LINKEDIN
linkedin.com/in/charleyjzhao
STATUS
Open to Summer Opportunities