I’m Rizwan Zafar. I help teams improve payment operations, shape products, manage complex programs and automate repetitive work with AI.
Based in Dubai. Working across markets.
Advisory, focused projects and leadership roles.
01 / FIND YOUR STARTING POINT
A payment challenge, a product decision, a delivery bottleneck or a workflow ready for automation. Start where you are.
Review payment journeys, partner integrations, settlement and reconciliation to identify where customers or your team get stuck.
Make the customer problem, commercial assumptions and delivery choices visible before the backlog grows.
Coordinate teams and vendors with clear owners, dependencies, milestones and decisions.
Find repeatable work worth automating. Keep evidence, evaluation and human review inside the design.
Explore payments, product and program leadership through the scope of the work and the decisions it required.
02 / SELECTED WORK
Payments, product launches
and program delivery.
SIMPAISA / PAYMENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Connecting payment methods, partners and operations into a platform teams can actually run.
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT / TAPMAD
As Head of Project and Product at Tapmad, I coordinated TapmadTV’s digital transformation across five technology workstreams, vendor dependencies and launch readiness.
Dependencies · Risks · Decisions · Vendor readiness
A simplified view of program coordination, not the original delivery schedule.
PAY-IN / SIMPAISA
Cards, wallets, carrier billing and bank transfers behind a stable merchant API.
Pay-in workstream within the payments platform.
Read the platform studyPAYOUT / CROSS-BORDER
Partner selection, FX quotes and settlement conditions shape how a cross-border payout works.
Payout workstream within the corridor and FX study.
Read the cross-border studyTREASURY & SETTLEMENT / SIMPAISA
Product ownership alongside finance, treasury and engineering to connect ledger balances, partner records and bank statements.
Treasury collaboration and settlement product work.
Read the settlement studyMERCHANT ONBOARDING / SIMPAISA
Connect the merchant journey with the review tools and risk decisions operations teams need.
Product ownership across merchant experience and operations.
Read the onboarding studyPRODUCT ECONOMICS / TAPMAD
Direct carrier billing helped reach subscribers. Wallet migration changed the cost of serving them.
Payment strategy and product delivery at Tapmad.
Read the monetisation study
FROM FRAGMENTED TASKS TO CONNECTED WORKFLOWS
Make the handoffs work.
03 / AI AUTOMATION
Start with a task your team repeats: answering support questions, reviewing documents or preparing reports. I can help assess the workflow, prototype an assistant and define how its answers will be checked.
Explore AI automation support ↗Read the published AI case study ↗What should an assistant do next?
Use approved integration documentation. Show the source, flag missing information and escalate when the answer is uncertain.
Illustrative interaction. No live AI or payment action is performed.
04 / FIELD NOTES
The complete library ↗Working guides for the decisions teams face: payment flows, product scope, delivery governance and practical AI.
8 selected field guides
Reconcile PSP, ledger and bank records with match keys, tolerances, exception categories and service levels.
5 min read↗Follow ISO 8583 messages, interpret outcomes and handle timeouts without treating every retry as a new payment.
8 min read↗Use nine sections to document rail choice, risk, settlement, compliance, operations and launch gates before engineering starts.
5 min read↗Rank roadmap work against revenue, failure costs, compliance, fraud, settlement risk and reliability—not revenue alone.
5 min read↗Plan a fintech PMO’s first 90 days: what to establish, what to govern centrally and what to leave with squads.
7 min read↗Choose the PMO artefacts, governance rhythm and PMBOK–Agile practices that help regulated fintech programmes ship.
6 min read↗Design a merchant-support RAG system around a curated corpus, required citations, fallback paths and an operating model.
6 min read↗Define the task, build an evaluation set and set release criteria for quality, cost, latency and human review.
10 min read↗05 / WORKING TOGETHER
Scope, deliverables & questions ↗Tell me what is getting in the way, who is involved and what would make a difference.
Choose the scope, deliverables, responsibilities and measures before work begins.
A decision, a roadmap, an operating model or a tested workflow your team can take forward.
No. Payments and fintech are my core domain. Product, program and AI automation support can also fit businesses with similar operating challenges. We start by checking the fit.
Yes. Start with the workflow, the people involved and the repetitive work. The first useful outcome may be a prioritised use-case map, rather than a new AI tool.
A short description of the challenge, the outcome you want and your rough timeline is enough. Please leave credentials, customer records and confidential data out of the first message.
Yes. Alongside project and advisory conversations, I welcome senior payments, product and program leadership opportunities. View my experience and résumé.
NEXT / A GOOD CONVERSATION
Tell me what you need to improve.
Payments, product and program delivery, or AI automation.
We’ll start with the problem and the fit.