Cto Chief Technology Officer
Smart Digital Finance Co.
Total years of experience :16 years, 2 Months
As a CTO I am responsible for Tiqmo leading technology strategy, building and scaling our platform, and ensuring that our solutions remain cutting-edge in the ever evolving fintech space.
Technology Vision and Leadership
• Setting tech vision for the organization and lead from all aspects of technological development.
• Working closely with vendors and other department heads and the CEO to define and deliver new products and enhancements.
Platform Development and Management
• Oversee the development, deployment, and maintenance of our digital lending platform.
• Ensure the platform is scalable, secure, and responsive to the needs of our customers.
Team Building and Management
• Recruit, mentor, and lead a high-performing tech team to achieve organization objectives.
• Create and oversee a tech culture that promotes innovation and continuous learning.
Security and Compliance
• Ensure that all tech solutions adhere to compliance & regulatory standards relevant to the fintech industry.
• Implement best practices for data security, ensuring the safety and privacy of user data.
Research and Innovation
• Stay abreast of the latest trends and technologies in the fintech space. Implement new technologies that could benefit our platform.
• Foster a culture of innovation and encourage the tech team to bring forward new ideas.
Stakeholder Management
• Communicate the technological strategy to investors, management, staff, partners, and stakeholders.
Budgeting and Forecasting
• Maintaining and budgeting the Lending Capex & Opex approx. USD $10 million Dollars.
• Develop and manage the technology budget, optimizing resource allocation to achieve maximum ROI.
• Identify cost-effective technology solutions and vendors.
Event, Seminars & Social Networking
• Represent the company at tech conferences, networking events, and with media.
As a CIO of Ziraat Bank Jeddah, I was responsible for 2 critical departments of Jeddah branch (IT, & Business Continuity) and leading, developing a comprehensive technology strategy to aligned with the Ziraat goals and objectives.
Responsibilities under the IT department
• Representing Ziraat Bank to SAMA Supervisory Team on yearly achievements and future visions of Bank.
• Successfully set up Information Security, Counter Fraud and Data Privacy departments within an organization.
• Main focal point of communication with SAMA & Saudi Payments, Vendors, and Bank teams.
• Managing IT & Business Continuity Strategy on a yearly basis and obtain HO Management approval.
• Managing IT & Business Continuity Budget and Forecasting on a yearly basis and submit to HO for approval.
• Review Branch policies and procedures, system manuals and ensure that we comply with SAMA frameworks.
• Managing IT, BC and InfoSec staff related hiring, training, and evaluating them by performing KPI’s.
• Monitoring on-going project status and enhancing Operations through CR and process improvement.
• Handling Business requirements and understanding needs by performing gap analysis.
• Requirement document and analyze them according to technological needs, also on how to perform automation to have minimum human intervention with a required process.
• Managing existing and New Vendors, negotiating with them and if required obtaining HO approval also.
• Active member of Bank Audit, ALCO, Credit, IT-BCM, InfoSec & Management Committees.
• Assist Vendors on the systems interface and if required perform gap analysis for any data mapping.
• Support CEO on filling the vacant position and conduct interviews with shortlisted candidates.
• Assist Internal/External Auditor on IT audit and review the observation report to prepare corrective action plan.
• Review IT Risk Register and monitor the activity on a regular basis.
• Review report on all existing issues and follow-up with vendors to provide fixes on a timely basis.
• Identify the need for systems upgrades, configurations, or new systems and propose in the upcoming budget.
Responsibilities under the BCM department
• Participates in supervising the implementation of Business Continuity Management strategy.
• Support team on the business continuity and recovery programs, and under guidance from the Management, enhance the business contingency plans, including enacting crisis-mode of operations for the business processes, the IT systems, or applications.
• Prepare departments’ assessment of potential business impact (Business Impact Analysis), definition of critical functions/processes, and design, development, and documentation of business continuity plans.
• Assist to provide a comprehensive ability to recover from a crisis and return its systems and operations with minimal operating risk including PRO & RTO.
• Oversee the team responsible for planning and implementation of the contingency plans for providing manual procedures development to mitigate any risk associated with complete or partial failure of facilities, IT systems, or applications due to a crisis.
• Participate in communications between key departments during a crisis.
• Interact with the critical staff and teams for the purpose of planning, directing, controlling, and maintaining the contingency planning effort during the crisis.
• Review current business continuity projects to have a holistic view of overall BCM efforts and prepare the testing and exercising of business continuity plans and systems.
• Support Head of Operations Support in planning and implementation of all new Banking and Satellite
• Systems & Applications from Operations perspective which is part of GIB ENJAZ-2015.
• Participate and represent the Retail and Wholesale Operations in all required meetings.
• Prepare monthly management reports by gathering statistics from all units under Operations.
• Support Head of Operations Support on implementation GIB Enjaz-2015 Proposition.
• Preparing Yearly Financial & 7 Years forecasting Planning by coordinating with Unit Heads
• As an Operations Relocation Manager, my role was to attend Relocation task force meeting and prepare relocation plan of 184+ Operations staffs under supervision of Head of Operations Support and submit to
• committee for their approval on floors layouts and staff movement plan.
• Coordinate with Admin Services team on the readiness of Operations Floors, Corporate Branches covering all regions (Central, Eastern, & Western) to ensure premises, hardware’s, F&E, and applications are ready before relocating of staffs (Geographical staff moving plan)
• Prepare test scripts based on Business Requirement covering all scenarios for Retail and wholesale dept.
• Create, review, and update the process flow maps with standard operating procedures for both Retail and
• Wholesale operations by coordinating among all stake holders.
• Act as Business Analyst & System Administrator and as a single point of contact to address all technical and functional issues related to daily processing.
• Investigate and escalate Operations related queries and problems. Organize and maintain history to follow-up for the issues reported to IT, Vendors, or concern departments.
• Parameterization of Core Banking application (Oracle-Flexcube) from basic setup to Products setup.
• Develop and maintain digitalization strategy, evaluating the realization of optimal benefits from and ensuring congruence with the organizational strategy.
• Liaise with the concerned business stakeholders to capture their business requirements and propose new business applications and enhance existing ones accordingly.
• Initiate and manage the IT initiatives portfolio through prioritization, planning for execution, managing allocated budgets, and managing effectiveness against the digitalization strategy.
• Ensure reliability, consistency, and optimal operation of IT infrastructure, equipment, and solutions to ensure business operations continuity and sustainability.
• Develop, design, and implement IT solutions that cater to the business requirements including Islamic Banking, Investment Solution & Business Intelligence Solutions.
• Ensure the monitoring of the IT systems and applications continuously to identify any issues that may disrupt the application service delivery to the end users and ensure efficiently resolution.
As an IT Support, my responsibilities was to provide high-level support on
• Setup IT Infrastructure for Core Banking, System Production and Maintenance from the scratch and
ensure that the implementation of all systems with vendors in accordance with SAMA Compliant.
• Understand Business & Operation departments issues and opportunities in the context of requirements and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
• Developing the Departmental plans according to the Bank Business Strategies.
• Planning for the major projects activities and trying to reduce the impact on Bank Business.
• Ensuring that adequate policies and procedures are all in documentation and are available to cover all bank assets.
First Line support of core banking system and providing 24/7 support with 99% uptime commitment.
• Managing Data Centre overall operation performing & monitoring EOD batch jobs, backup and restoration.
• Performing local/remote backup and restore, performing full/incremental backups.
• Preparing of Daily System Status Reports which include (COB time delay analysis, Problem Reporting), RFC (Request for Change management), monitor and performance analysis.
• Check and ensure that Operations and Systems daily logs are being accomplished and completed.
• Keeping track of critical system passwords and issue them on user’s request according to Security policy.
• Weekly Schedule maintenance, Upgrades, fixing patches and testing, monitoring error logs.
• Perform Government Salary as per SAMA notifications.
• Data and System Archiving of production systems as per schedule.
• Preparing the Daily Systems Status Report for senior management.
• Preparing Operator’s monthly shift rotation.