Egypt
I am a highly motivated and goal-oriented leader offering 30 years of experience in the IT and Financial Services industry. I managed multiple departments of large scale organizations across multiple geographic locations. My strong project management skills have enabled me to build a track record of delivering large-scale commercial projects. I received an MS in Computer-Aided-Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I am currently the Chief Technology Officer at Kazyon Group, one of the largest and fastest growing hard discount retailers in the MENA region, where I am responsible for implementing a unified digital transformation strategy for the group. I am also the Chief Executive Officer at Kazyon Plus, a fintech company providing a digital platform addressing all financial and non-financial needs of the market segment serviced by Kazyon Group. Prior to Kazyon, I was the Chief Information Officer and Head of Digital Innovation at Banque Misr, where I was responsible for transforming the IT department and integrating technology into all areas of the bank with the goal of fundamentally changing how the bank operates and how it delivers value to its customers. Before joining Banque Misr, I was the Chief Operations Officer of Non-Market Operations and the Chief Information Officer at EFG Hermes, where I was responsible for driving support to all EFG Hermes’ lines of business, in addition to steering the technology strategy of the firm. Before EFG Hermes, I was Vice President of Development for Primavera Systems headquartered in Pennsylvania USA, where I led the design, programming, testing and documentation of the Primavera enterprise project, resource and portfolio management solutions and helped drive the company’s implementation of agile development methodologies.
Group CTO Kazyon - Responsible for defining and implementing the technology strategy for the Group. This involves unifying the technology platform, enabling the development of standardized applications, tools and workflows that are rolled out across all countries - Developed a centralized geo-graphical platform that provides real-time monitoring of all stores, warehouses and sales managers for all countries where Kazyon operates - Created a comprehensive data warehouse for the group, enabling the creation of real time dynamic reporting - Developed a middleware engine to provide real-time integration with external partners and services - Designing LLM-based solutions, leveraging the extensive data available in the company, to generate actionable business intelligence using AI - Developing predictive models to forecast sales performance and customer churn CEO Kazyon Plus - Tripled the revenue on the online shopping platform over the past 2.5 years - Rebuilt the company’s eCommerce platform to become a one stop shop for all Kazyon customers - Established partnerships with third parties to generate cross-selling opportunities and value-added services - Working closely with aggregators and BNPL providers to enhance services for Kazyon customers - Leveraging data analytics and behavioral scoring to segment the loyalty customers of Kazyon to provide them with customized financial services and personalized offers
- Responsible for directing overall IT Strategy and Operations as well as leading the Digital Transformation initiative of the bank. This involved integrating digital technologies into all areas of the bank with the goal of fundamentally changing how the bank operated and how it delivered value to its customers. This included leading a team of 450 employees with a budget responsibility of USD 50 million - Delivered the bank’s first Internet and Mobile Banking offering for Retail and Corporate customers in 18 months which currently has more than 1million registered and 400K active users - Created a robust middleware for the bank currently supporting 22 internal and external systems. The bank is also currently in the process of creating a comprehensive Open API framework - Developed new digital channels for our customers (IRS, IPN, E-Forms, SME Express) - Increased operational stability and infrastructure capacity of our core systems in conjunction with the exponential growth in the business - Automated critical processes to eliminate errors and reduce processing time including the use of Robotics Process Automation RPA across the bank to automate more than 150 recurring and on demand tasks - Introduced proactive monitoring of infrastructure and application services using CA and AppDynamics - Designed the future state infrastructure of the bank based on latest technology trends - Started the migration of the bank’s Disaster Recovery data center to a Tier 4 colocation data center - First bank in Egypt to launch its Chatbot with interactive live chatting - First bank in Egypt to launch WhatsApp for business - First bank in Egypt to enable Booking CDs through ATMs - Assisted Misr Digital Innovation (MDI) in the architecture and integration of the Digital Banking App
- Responsible for overseeing the IT, Marketing, Legal, Facilities and Administration departments across EFG Hermes, the Leading Investment Bank in Egypt and the Middle East, directing overall strategy and driving support to all of the firm's lines of business - Lead the Expense Policy Committee of the firm chartered with reviewing and controlling the expenses of the firm, resulting in a revamped Expense Policy manual for the firm - Chartered with heading a Committee responsible for evolving the Corporate structure of the firm, resulting in the roll-out of departmental KPIs as well as standard levels and titles across Front and Back-Office functions - Restructured the Marketing Department by establishing dedicated Corporate Communications and Digital Marketing functions within the team, as well as adopting a proactive approach in dealing with media and government relations - Worked with the newly-formed Non-Banking Finance business line to launch the Leasing and other platforms, which involved managing the full project life cycle - Worked alongside Co-Head of Brokerage to grow the firm’s online trading business, which resulted in the formation of a strategic partnership with Saxo Bank, the leading global online trading specialist. The first deliverable of this partnership is the development of “EFG Hermes One”; the first online retail platform in the region providing real time regional market access and tailored technical and fundamental analyses and recommendation, as well as global markets access across multiple asset classes, including Equities, Fixed Income, Commodities, CFDs and FX, all within one platform - Established an IT blueprint for opening offices and branches in new locations, both as greenfield investments as well as through acquisitions - Evolved the IT infrastructure of the firm to adopt a hybrid model of cloud and in-house services
- Responsible for directing overall technology strategy and driving IT development to further support and enhance EFG Hermes products and services, as well as augment internal efficiency and productivity across geographies. This involved leading a staff of over 70 employees - Restructured IT around centralized Corporate functions and decentralized Operational hubs - Instilled a Project Management Culture that focused on deliverables and stakeholder requirements - Implemented Disaster Recovery sites in Egypt and KSA providing near zero RPO and minimum RTO - Enhanced the in-house developed Brokerage Application Architecture to transform it into a truly mission critical and scalable enterprise platform - Expanded the Product Offerings of the Brokerage Application to cover retail and institutional clients, including the implementation of regional Cross Trading capabilities supporting real-time portfolio integration - Increased reliability of IT Infrastructure while keeping costs under control - Created a dedicated Enterprise Applications Team responsible for EFG’s enterprise application products - Launched numerous Enterprise Applications within the firm to automate business processes and improve efficiency - Rolled out the firm’s first CRM system to manage the sales process across all business lines - Implemented an MIS System that integrates the financials of all business lines within the firm - Changed the Development Process to an agile process with monthly deliverables and stakeholder meetings
- Responsible for all aspects of software development, analyses, testing, project management, and documentation of Primavera Systems, the leading Enterprise Project Management software company. This involved managing a staff of 105 employees with a budget responsibility of USD 14 million - Established an Offshore Development Center in Bangalore, India. The offshore center had 16 developers, was fully integrated with the onshore team, followed an Agile development process, and had reached the same level of productivity as the onshore teams - Evolved Primavera’s implementation of Agile to make it a more predictable process. This involved creating a separate Release Management team, as well as introducing a “Big Sprint 0” at the beginning of the project, intended to enable teams to better understand requirements and provide backlog estimates they can deliver against. This also included establishing objective performance measures to track progress of both onshore and offshore teams - Enhanced and formalized Primavera’s development process to make it better aligned with ISO 9001standards. The department was independently audited and was found to be in alignment with ISO at the Policy and Procedure level - Established Primavera’s position as a leader in the Agile community by sharing the company’s experiences at conferences and reputable publications, as well as mentoring organizations starting to adopt Agile methodologies. - Created a formal triage team within Development with rotational assignments to quickly respond to customer needs, deliver periodic service packs, and minimize resource diversion. - Redefined the roles within the Development organization in order to create better career pathing options for developers. This involved creating a separate technical track within each department, and refocusing the role of the functional managers on team development and daily operations.
- Lead a staff of 40 programmers responsible for delivering a large-scale Enterprise Project Management application suite consisting of Web as well as Client/Server technology components - Managed the development effort of 5 commercial releases of the company’s Enterprise application suite - Championed the implementation of a new agile development process, called SCRUM, to replace the traditional waterfall approach. This process enabled the development team to better react to changing market conditions, and pushed the authority down to the teams doing the work, resulting in increased productivity and morale. - Improved the skill set of the developers on the team by cross-training all developers on both Windows and Web technologies, making the team better equipped to handle the specific business needs of each release. - Changed the customers’ perception on the Scalability and Performance of the enterprise suite by implementing a plan to resolve scalability and performance problems and transforming the suite into one of the most scalable products on the market - Provided the vision and championed the development of a server-side API that allows third party integrators to extend the product’s functionality as well as integrate our suite with other enterprise applications
- Delivered Primavera Enterprise 2.0 with significant feature enhancements, including the first integrated Multi-project Management Structure. Product very favorably reviewed in InfoWorld magazine http://www.infoworld.com/articles/mt/xml/00/10/23/001023mtprimavera.xml. - Championed the development of the company’s next generation product suite, which is a fully web enabled enterprise project management software suite