Engineer first.
Payments operator second.
Product leader by design.
Product & Program leader in regulated payments. 14+ years across product, payments, programme delivery and digital transformation. Currently CPO at Simpaisa: helped scale the B2B payments platform from $0 to $1B+ TPV across 7 markets, 50+ bank, wallet and FI partners, built the 40-engineer organisation from 2 people across 12 cross-functional squads, deployed 4 production GenAI solutions, and infrastructure now used by TikTok, Uber, Temu, InDrive, MoneyGram and PUBG. Earlier: $3M digital transformation programme at TapmadTV, payments ops at Daraz (Alibaba Group), PMO setups at Wing Logic and DS Engineering. PMP, PMI-ACP, CSPO, CSM, COBIT 5, ITIL v3. Engineer's discipline, programme manager's tempo, regulator's vocabulary.
Before payments, I learned reliability in systems where failure had real consequences, five substations, real-time data, control-room shifts. That operating discipline shaped how I build payment infrastructure today.
14+ years across product, payments and complex program delivery, including 8+ years building regulated payment infrastructure at scale. PMO years at DS Engineering and Wing Logic taught me to make governance useful instead of bureaucratic. A year in the DRC running $8M of IT infrastructure taught me to plan when nothing is reliable.
Tapmad was the leap into payments. A subscription business being eaten alive by telco margins. I launched DCB across all four major telcos, then migrated the rail mix to wallets, payment cost dropped from ~50% of revenue to ~1%, ARPU grew 70%, and we scaled past 5M paid subscribers. That's when I learned that payments product is unit-economics work first and UX work second.
Daraz (Alibaba Group) added multi-country payment operations during a COVID volume surge , settlement, disputes, fraud rule configuration, COD-to-digital conversion across five markets. Useful exposure to recon and compliance at Alibaba scale.
Since 2020 I've been CPO at Simpaisa, building regulated payment infrastructure across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iraq and Egypt. Card acquiring (MPGS/MDES), wallets, DCB, IBFT, payouts, cross-border corridors with real-time FX. Onboarding cut from weeks to hours. Fraud loss below 0.1% of GTV. Payment failure rate down from ~8% to ~1.2% through routing, retries and acquirer SLA management. Downtime down 90%. Local infrastructure partner for DLocal, Thunes, Boku and Coda, enabling TikTok, Temu, Uber, InDrive, MoneyGram and PUBG to collect and disburse where they had no local rails. $1B+ GTV. 25M+ monthly transactions. 99.95% settlement SLA. Built and led a 40-engineer payments org across 12 cross-functional squads. Launched BNPL from 0 to 100K users in 8 months. PCI DSS and ISO/IEC 27001 from scratch. Dual CPO + acting CTO through 2024 regulatory tightening.
Where I'm headed
Senior product and payment infrastructure roles at companies building serious payments platforms, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Wise, Adyen, Thunes, DLocal and similar. Based in Dubai. Open to UAE, KSA, Singapore, MENA, Europe and global fintech.
- Mastering Design Thinking (Executive Program)MIT Sloan School of ManagementAug 2022, Dec 2022
- M.Sc. PhysicsUniversity of Karachi2009, 2012
- B.Sc. PhysicsUniversity of Karachi2007, 2009
- · Project Management Professional (PMP), PMI
- · PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), PMI
- · Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Scrum Alliance
- · Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Scrum Alliance
- · COBIT 5, IT Governance (ISACA)
- · ITIL v3, IT Service Management (Axelos)
- · Led PCI DSS certification program from scratch (Simpaisa)
- · Led ISO/IEC 27001 certification program from scratch (Simpaisa)
- Youngest Project Manager of the YearIndustry honor · 2015
From payments leaders , in progress.
Modern fintech recommendations from payments leaders, partners and regulators are being collected and will appear here. For now, references are available on request.
Request referencesEarlier career references (pre-payments)6 entries→
“An optimistic and willing professional who was a joy to work with. He could see the solution to a problem in advance before his colleagues. A man who saw a challenge instead of a problem, and passed every one of them with his iconic smile.”
“A focused, smart-working and talented individual. Rizwan's ability to juggle multiple tasks was unlike any I've seen before and made a dramatic difference in the productivity of the project. He would be an asset to any team.”
“An efficient project engineer with strong command over his area of work and the relevant international standards.”
“I highly recommend Mr. Rizwan as a capable project manager and a strong professional. A good person and a very good friend.”
“A strongly growing project manager with real capacity to coordinate teams, clients and head office.”
“Rizwan is one of the fastest learners I have ever encountered.”