Simpaisa Payment Infrastructure Platform

Owned the product, architecture and operating model of a five-market payments platform serving global enterprises and local merchants. Took a fragmented integration estate and turned it into a single regulated rail with shared APIs, ledger, settlement and risk, through a CTO departure and a regulatory tightening.

Merchants and platforms operating in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iraq and Egypt needed a single regulated rail to accept, payout, settle and reconcile across cards (MPGS/MDES), wallets, IBFT, DCB and cross-border corridors, without stitching together fragile point integrations. In 2024, regulatory tightening and a CTO departure forced the platform to operate under heightened scrutiny without losing pace.

• Unified pay-in API across cards, wallets, DCB, IBFT and bank transfers
• Payout and disbursement engine with corridor-aware routing
• Wallet ledger, hold/release flows and partner subaccounts
• Cross-border + FX layer integrating DLocal, Thunes, Boku, Coda and MoneyGram
• Settlement and reconciliation engine with T+0/T+1 reporting
• Merchant console: onboarding, KYC/KYB, dashboards and dispute workflows

• Single pay-in/payout API surface, rails are an implementation detail behind a stable contract
• Canonical double-entry ledger; rails post events, settlement reads from the ledger
• Corridor abstraction with routing policy (cost, success rate, partner health)
• Risk service in-line: pre-auth, post-auth and async monitoring share one feature store
• Event-driven webhooks; idempotency, retries and DLQs are first-class

• 25+ person org across product, engineering, ops, risk and compliance
• Weekly rail health reviews, success rate, cost, latency, dispute rate per partner
• Joint risk + product council owning the risk taxonomy and false-positive budget
• Regulator-facing reporting pipeline owned by product, not finance

Chief Product Officer (acting CTO during the 2024 regulatory tightening). Owned product strategy, roadmap, partner integrations, regulatory posture, security architecture and the org structure to ship and operate the platform end-to-end.

• Scaled to $1B+ annual GTV and 25M+ monthly transactions across 5 countries
• Onboarded enterprise platforms including TikTok, Uber, InDrive, Temu, PUBG and MoneyGram
• Held fraud loss below 0.1% of GTV; cut platform downtime by 90%
• Led PCI DSS and ISO/IEC 27001 certification programs from scratch
• Drove 30% enterprise wallet adoption and 99.95% settlement SLA

• Chose a single ledger over per-rail ledgers, slower to ship rail #1, much faster after rail #3
• Built risk in-house rather than fully outsourcing, higher ops cost, far lower false-positive rate
• Kept enterprise-grade onboarding for low-volume merchants, accepted some activation friction to preserve regulator posture

• Payment infrastructure is a product problem, not a platform problem, orchestration, error states and retries decide the experience.
• In emerging markets, local payment methods determine acceptance more than card-network features.
• Compliance posture (PCI DSS, ISO 27001, AML/CFT) is a sales asset, not a cost line.

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Wise, Adyen, Thunes and DLocal need leaders who can stand up regulated multi-rail infrastructure across non-trivial markets and run it under regulator scrutiny. This is the full job, partner enablement, scheme readiness, settlement, risk, reporting, done at $1B+ GTV.