Michele Mandelli

Michele Mandelli is co-founder, Board Member and Chief Financial Officer of CheckSig, the first crypto-asset service provider (CASP) authorised in Italy under the MiCAR Regulation.

His speciality is designing and building financial institutions from the ground up. He did so for fifteen years as a strategy consultant, launching new banks in Italy, and does so today at CheckSig, an intermediary built with the rigour, controls and governance of a bank.

He joined CheckSig in 2021 alongside its two founders and has helped lead its growth from start-up to regulated group, operating in Italy and Switzerland, with more than 2,000 clients and over €100 million in crypto-assets under custody. He personally led the MiCAR authorisation project, coordinating internal teams and the dialogue with Consob and the Bank of Italy. Before that, he oversaw the incorporation of CheckSig Suisse, where he sits on the Board, and its affiliation with a FINMA-recognised self-regulatory organisation. As CFO, his mission is to industrialise the group's finance function to the standards of a supervised intermediary.

On the commercial side, he championed internally the creation of CheckSig Clear, the B2B2C business line that enables banks and financial intermediaries to offer crypto services to their own clients, and oversaw its launch. He maintains direct relationships with Italy's leading banking groups.

He is a member of the Parliamentary Intergroup on Digital Assets, Blockchain and Bitcoin of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, sitting on the working groups on stablecoins, CBDCs and payment systems, and on banks, banking foundations and pension funds. He is a regular speaker at major financial-industry conferences and comments in the national media on the relationship between banks and crypto-assets.

Before CheckSig, he worked at Monitor Deloitte and then at The Boston Consulting Group, where he was a Principal in the Financial Institutions practice. In both firms he advised CEOs and boards of major banking groups on strategy, digital transformation and the launch of new banks. At Deloitte he also led the strategy team of the EMEA Blockchain Lab, advising systemically important financial institutions on crypto-asset custody and euro-denominated stablecoins.

An entrepreneur beyond the financial sector, he co-founded PerLa Cura, a private medical group in Lombardy, and Teamsight, a people-analytics company acquired by Glickon.

He graduated with honours in Management from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and attended the Strategic Management in Banking programme at INSEAD.

He looks to the future of finance with optimism. He believes Bitcoin and crypto-assets will become a permanent part of what banks offer, and that the task of those building today is to make this possible in a way that is safe, transparent and regulated.