Zakir
Zafar
Mohammad
Strategy & transformation senior consultant in financial services — building product, digital and data-led growth for retail and Islamic banks across the Middle East.
A data-centric operator, in the room where banks change.
Significant experience in business and digital transformation, strategy, business development, program management and full-stack development across financial and IT services. Part of several large transformation programs in both industries.
Recent work spans transforming the Expat segment for a major KSA bank, launching a global liabilities product for one of the largest banks in the Middle East, and the One-Muthoot transformation across the Muthoot Pappachan Group's product lines and verticals.
I rely strongly on analytics and data-backed innovation to bring quantifiable transformation results — and on technology as an enabler, not an end.
Mandates & milestones.
Senior Management Consultant — Financial Services Strategy
- Mass-segment retail banking strategy for a major Saudi bank — 12-initiative roadmap with monthly ramp-up financial model and Year-1 P&L impact projection
- K-means-led customer segmentation framework underpinning AI-led growth, cashflow-based lending, and a Female-360 banking proposition
- Assets & Liabilities product management for the Expat segment of a major KSA bank — personal finance ↑17%, credit cards ↑31%, liabilities ↑1.5% CAGR; process redesign, RAC modifications and joint campaigns with risk, compliance and marketing
- Launched a global liabilities product for a major Middle East bank — 16.9k new-to-bank customers, 9.6k new salary accounts, SAR 178M revenue value and SAR 1.1B liability book growth
- Project charters and governance work across regional Islamic banking mandates
Product Manager — Secured Products
- Long-term roadmap of a secured-loans product with seamless integration across CRM, channels, partners, analytics, LMS, LOS and loyalty
- Initiated a blockchain-driven program for security ownership and mortgage-history tracking with a geospatial services partner
Lead — Strategy & Transformation
- Defined and implemented short and long-term growth goals across the Group, reporting into the Chief Strategy Officer
- Introduced automation and machine learning into core business processes of Muthoot Fincorp Ltd.
Product Developer — Riskmaster base team
- Member of the base development team for Riskmaster — full-stack, four years across .Net, SQL, JavaScript, React, C#, Oracle PL/SQL and AWS
- Contributed to migration of Riskmaster from on-premise to AWS-hosted SaaS
Selected data & AI work.
Mass-segment customer segmentation
K-means clustering on synthetic retail-banking customer data — income, transaction velocity, product holding and digital-engagement features — to surface actionable mass-segment personas.
Credit risk scoring — PD model
Probability-of-default scorecard built with logistic regression and gradient boosting on synthetic loan applications. Compares model AUC, calibration and decile lift.
Retail churn prediction
End-to-end churn pipeline — feature engineering on tenure, balance trend, complaint volume and digital activity; classifier benchmark; SHAP-based reason codes for retention teams.
Next-best-action recommender
Lightweight collaborative-filtering and rules-based hybrid recommender that scores the next product to offer a banking customer based on holdings, recent transactions and lifecycle stage.