Hiring a payments product and program leader who's scaled $1B+ in frontier and emerging markets?
I'm Rizwan Zafar, CPO at Simpaisa. I pair payments product leadership — 270M+ payments a year across 5 regulated markets — with the program & PMO discipline that delivers it: multi-squad execution, SteerCo governance, vendor management and PCI-DSS / ISO 27001 programs run from scratch. MIT Sloan · Dubai · open globally.
15 minutes, no pitch — just whether there's a fit for your role. Booking happens right on this page.
Best fit: VP / Director / Head of Product, Payments · Program Director / Head of PMO · Technical Program Manager · Director, Digital Transformation. Open to UAE, KSA, Singapore, MENA and global roles.
- Payment infrastructure end-to-end: cross-border corridors, card acquiring (MPGS / MDES), wallets, DCB, settlement, FX
- Pay-in & payout rails on one API; merchant onboarding, KYC / KYB, fraud, AML / CFT
- Product strategy → roadmap → P&L ownership across 5 regulated frontier markets
- Built the PMO and delivery methodology from scratch; ran 12 cross-functional squads
- SteerCo & board governance, RAID logs, OKRs, RICE/MoSCoW; $5M+ budget, 15+ vendors
- Led PCI-DSS L1 & ISO 27001 certification programs — both audited without findings
- Dual CPO + acting CTO in 2024; shipped 4 market launches; 17 years delivery
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15 minutes · no pitch · times shown in your timezone.
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MIT Sloan · PMP · PMI-ACP · CSPO · CSM · COBIT 5 · ITIL v3 · Led PCI-DSS L1 & ISO/IEC 27001 from scratch — both audited without findings.