One merchant. Too many rails.
Cards, wallets, bank transfers, DCB and cross-border payouts were fragmented by market, partner and operating rule.
Rizwan Zafar · Chief Product Officer at Simpaisa · Dubai
I lead products and programmes where local rails, risk, compliance and operations meet.
17 yearsacross 10 career markets
Simpaisa platform · at a glance
Scale, with its scope made explicit.
- Annual GTV
- $1B+
- Payments a year
- 270M+
- Merchants served
- 150+
- Live markets today
- 5
Platform metrics only — separate from 17 years across 10 career markets.
See how the platform was builtOperating record
From fragmented rails to one dependable platform.
My role: Chief Product Officer; acting CTO during the 2024 regulatory tightening. I owned product strategy, platform roadmap, partner integrations and the operating model.
Make complexity a platform concern.
A stable API, canonical ledger, corridor-aware routing and shared risk controls turned local rails into one product surface.
Scale without losing control.
$1B+ annual GTV, 270M+ payments a year and a 99.95% settlement SLA across 5 live markets.
Explore the full case studyAcceptancePayoutsCross-borderRisk
$1B+ annual GTV270M+ payments / yr99.95% settlement SLA
- Challenge
- Decisions
- Outcomes
Selected operating stories
Selected story · Daraz, Alibaba Group
Acceptance is a trust problem wearing a checkout interface.
- Context
- Checkout acceptance across five South Asian markets through a COVID-driven volume surge.
- Decision
- Treat COD-to-digital as a trust, local-method and risk-rules programme.
- Outcome
- ~40% wider payment coverage · shorter dispute cycles
- My role
- Owned multi-country payment operations and the checkout-acceptance surface.
Selected story · Tapmad
Payment cost is a product variable.
- Context
- Operator economics consumed up to half of subscription revenue.
- Decision
- Build DCB, then migrate the billing model toward wallet-native payments.
- Outcome
- 50% → ~1% payment cost · 5M+ subscribers
- My role
- Owned monetisation and billing across Pakistan, UAE and KSA.
Platform ecosystem
Global reach. Local depth.
Built across local rails, global platforms and regulated markets.
01Merchants & platforms
02Payment & network collaborators
Public relationship marks reproduced from Simpaisa’s current company page.
Explore the platform storyLeadership in practice
Strategy, infrastructure, operations.
Engineering → PMO
Built the delivery discipline before owning product systems.Programme → Product
Monetisation, checkout acceptance and multi-market payment operations.Platform ownership
Product strategy, regulated infrastructure and the operating model together.
17 years10 markets across my career
12 squads40-engineer payments organisation · mobile, backend, payments, risk and compliance · platform-wide delivery
Read the full journeyField notes
Ideas tested against live systems.
Direct line
Building through complexity?
I’m open to senior product, payments and transformation roles — and thoughtful conversations about the systems behind them.