When he was a kid growing up with his grandparents on the Cape Flats, he looked around him and he assumed that this is what his life would be like. People that looked like him and sounded like him were all struggling to get by, trapped in a cycle of poverty and crime. As he grew up however, he began to realise that the colour of your skin and your surroundings does not define you. He started developing the confidence that he had lacked and began building the idea that if he believed in himself, he could reach for the ceiling and beyond. Not only did he reach the ceiling but broke through it when it was announced that he would become the Chief Executive Officer of South Africa’s newest bank, TymeBank.
Now, not many people can claim that they helped build a bank from the ground up but Chesyln can. When he started working on the Tyme project back in 2012, it had exactly zero clients, zero value and no office. It operated from the offices of Deloitte, the company that started the Tyme project and also the company that employed Cheslyn as a Senior Consultant. It was also in 2012 that Tyme got its own offices and promoted Cheslyn to the position of Tyme’s Head of Distribution and Training. From here, Cheslyn began working his way to the top, helping to build Tyme into a company with over 10 million clients, worth over R26 billion and offices all across the country.
From 2015, he was promoted to the positions of National Field Operations Manager and then Head of Money Transfer and Head of Sales and Service. He built the teams that would sell the product, established the bank’s distribution networks, launched and grew the bank’s Money Transfer service, and designed and built its sales and distribution capabilities. It was in 2022 that he moved into the executive offices as the Chief Commercial Officer and of course, 3 years later, he was appointed to run the company. Of course, he did not start out in a senior position.
Back in 2006 and 2007, his first two jobs were as a computer lab assistant at the University of the Western Cape and a documentation clerk at Safmarine. He then joined the graduate programme at Standard Bank where he worked his way to Junior Human Resources Consultant, Business Manager, Consumer Education Manager and finally, Business Support Manager before joining Deloitte as a Senior Consultant.
Cheslyn has a Commerce degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of the Western Cape and a Post Graduate Diploma in General Management; Industrial Psychology and Economics from the GIBS Business School.
Cheslyn often looks at his kids and is amazed at how confident and knowledgeable they are. He thinks about his own childhood and how limited his own worldview was. He is grateful that he could provide them with an upbringing that exposes them to a broader world and it makes him realise how important confidence and knowledge is to the development of a child. Being the kid that lacked that confidence, he hopes that many more will discover that they are more capable than they give themselves credit for.
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