Profile: Andy Demetriades

Andy Demetriades was all set for a year of travelling when he finished his A-Levels back in the early 1990s.

But a chance conversation after a school football match set him on a different kind of journey, one that took him to the City of London and would ultimately lead to a career in the world of digital assets.

Andy, it is fair to say, was a very good footballer and would go on to play at the highest level of non-league with the likes of Boreham Wood and Edgware Town.

But it was off the field where the sport had a truly life-changing effect.

“Just before I was going to set off for my travels, the school that I belonged to – Christ’s College in Finchley – held an annual traditional First XI versus Old Boys XI match and I was captain of the First XI,” he said.

“It just so happened that my opposite number was managing director of Harlow Butler Ueda, a worldleading money brokerage business. We got chatting afterwards and he asked me my plans. I told him I was going to go off around Europe and would go a boy and come back a man.

“He gave me a proposition. He asked me to enrol in their apprentice scheme to earn some extra money over the summer to help supplement the trip but, if I liked it, it could be somewhere that I’d want to start my career.”

Andy took the role as a desk clerk dealing in the Deutschmark and walked into an unforgettable first day that evokes visions of a scene from the Wolf of Wall Street.

“It was an open outcry pit – the kind you see in the movies – lots of people waving pieces of paper, coloured jackets and a lot of shouting and screaming,” he smiled. “The noise hit me like a tsunami and my eyes lit up and I know I had found my place.

“I’ve been in the City of London and financial services ever since.”

After Harlow Butler Ueda, he joined an online financial services firm – just as the internet was taking off – and spent the next few years helping to grow that before being head-hunted by a stock securities firm in the early 2000s.

“The dotcom boom – and bust – had happened and they were looking to diversify the offering to their client,” he said. “I was brought in to help build-up a foreign exchange division so they weren’t entirely reliant on what they’d done previously.”