About Michael Farahat
Entrepreneur and technology leader, working across fintech, artificial intelligence, and the creative work that makes either of them land.
- 18+
- years of experience
- 3
- markets built in
Fintech and banking
Open Banking, payments, and the account and transaction rails beneath them: the layer that decides whether a product can exist at all. Working there means arguing the technical design and the commercial case in the same meeting, to people who will test both. Banks move slowly for reasons that are usually good ones, and the job is as much about risk, compliance and integration as it is about the product.
Artificial intelligence
Models are cheap now. What is scarce is knowing which decision inside a business is worth automating, and what it costs to be wrong about it. Decisioning, risk, reconciliation, customer intelligence: the places where machine learning and data science move a number somebody is accountable for. A commercial judgement before it is a technical one, and the part most projects get wrong.
Business development and management
Market entry, segmentation and pricing, and international expansion across three markets. Programmes run in Agile or in Waterfall according to what the work needs rather than what is in fashion: a regulated integration and a product discovery are not the same problem and do not want the same method. Teams built and coached in Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, which is a different skill from building one at home. What motivates, what reads as direct, and what a yes actually means all move with the room.
Marketing and brand
Positioning, identity, and the story a company tells about itself, for corporate clients and for its own products. Most of that work is deciding what a business is genuinely claiming, then making the claim survive contact with a market that has heard every version of it before. Campaigns and launches, and the measurement that says whether either of them worked.
Filmmaking and production
Directing and producing, end to end: script, shoot, edit, delivery. This is not a hobby bolted onto the rest. Film is where you learn that an idea nobody can follow is not yet an idea, and that attention is earned rather than assumed. A technical proposition gets backed when somebody can hold it in their head, which is the same craft pointed at a different room.
The combination is the point. The engineering conversation with a technical team, the commercial one with its board, and the telling that makes either of them land, in Arabic or English.