The first payment system I ran was judged by whether failure had consequences: reliability wasn't a metric, it was the job.
That standard came from before payments. My career started on power-utility infrastructure — five substations, field operations, downtime monitoring — where a system that fell over had immediate, physical consequences. I have carried that definition of "done" through every role since.
Engineering → delivery → product
I began as a planning engineer on utility and power infrastructure in Karachi (PESCO, 2009), then moved into programme delivery — a $15M engineering portfolio at DS Engineering, ERP and IT projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at CIMKO, and my first Dubai role building a PMO from nothing for a $12M+ portfolio at Wing Logic. Different industries, one thread: plan for the day nothing is reliable.
Product followed delivery. At Tapmad I owned monetization for Pakistan's leading OTT platform and built the billing that turned it into a business. At Daraz (Alibaba Group) I ran payment operations across five markets through a COVID volume surge. Then at Simpaisa I became Chief Product Officer, building full-stack payment infrastructure — card acquiring, wallets, cross-border corridors, settlement and the risk controls underneath.
Frontier markets became the specialty on purpose. Constraint breeds operators: when the rails are fragmented, the regulator is watching and the infrastructure is unreliable, you learn to build products that survive contact with reality. That is the work I am best at, and the work I chose.
- 2009PESCO — Sr. Planning Engineer (power infrastructure)
- 2012DS Engineering — Project Manager, PMO
- 2016CIMKO — Asst. Manager, Projects (DR Congo)
- 2017Wing Logic — PMO & Project Manager (first Dubai role)
- 2017Tapmad — Sr. Project & Product Manager (OTT billing)
- 2020Daraz (Alibaba Group) — PM, Payments Operations
- 2020Simpaisa — Chief Product Officer (acting CTO, 2024)
Three operating beliefs
Domestic rails beat international schemes.
In frontier markets the cheapest, most reliable money movement is local: wallets, DCB, IBFT, bill-payment and cash-over-counter. My job at Simpaisa was to turn those fragmented local rails into products enterprises could actually integrate against — so global platforms could collect and disburse where they had no rails of their own.
The wallet is the market's real UX.
At Tapmad I watched carrier billing bleed half of revenue to the telcos, then led the migration to wallet-based billing. The wallet — not the card, not the checkout page — is where retention, subscription management and unit economics are really decided in these markets.
Compliance is a product surface, not a checkbox.
KYC/KYB, AML/CFT, sanctions screening and settlement controls are features you design, not paperwork you bolt on. Treating them as product is how onboarding went from weeks to hours for standard-risk merchants while fraud loss stayed under control.
The paper trail
Executive education, professional certifications, recognition, chapter service, and the compliance programmes I stood up. The last line is Simpaisa-platform scope.
- Executive education
- MIT Sloan — Mastering Design Thinking (executive program)
- Professional certifications
- PMP
- PMI-ACP
- CSPO
- CSM
- COBIT 5
- ITIL v3
- Recognition
- PMI "Youngest Project Manager of the Year", 2015
- Service
- PMI Karachi — VP, Volunteering (2022–2023)
- PMI Karachi — Director, Governance (2021–2022)
- Programmes led (Simpaisa platform)
- Built PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO/IEC 27001 certification from scratch
Where to go next
Read the recruiter brief and book a call.
A 5-minute view of role fit, then a slot to talk.
Payments essays and the infrastructure notes.
Field notes on rails, reconciliation, KYB and AI in operations. Advisory opens Q4.
Talks, podcasts and press.
Frontier-market payments, regulated-fintech product and AI-assisted delivery.