My career began at Standard Chartered Bangladesh. I started
in credit collections, moved into risk management for the
branch network, then spent time as a Relationship Manager
for small and medium enterprises before returning to risk
management in the lead-up to my departure. Those early years
built the foundation: understanding how credit behaves under
stress, how the branch network actually functions as a risk
environment, and how clients experience the institution from
the outside. After roughly five years, I left for NRB Bank Limited.
NRB Bank was a different kind of education entirely. It was
a new bank in formation, and the mandate was proportionally
broader. I supported the Head of Retail as Head of Risk and
as his Business Performance Manager, which meant I was not
managing risk in a defined lane. I was in Treasury for budget
discussions, in meetings with the CFO to launch new products
including credit cards, and learning how branch licensing
works from the inside. For someone still building their
career, that kind of institutional breadth is rare. You learn
what building looks like, not just what operating looks like.
I returned to Standard Chartered Bangladesh as Risk Manager
for Products, taking responsibility for the risk governance
of the entire retail banking product portfolio. Over time
I took over the full team and left as Senior Business Risk
Manager, reporting to the Head of Business Risk. A decade
across both stints at Standard Chartered, and each phase
demanded something different.
bKash was an entirely different ball game. I joined during
COVID, stepping into a risk function at an institution that
had already changed how the country moves money, its name
having become synonymous with a verb rather than a noun.
bKash was still building the governance architecture to
match its ever increasing size and complexity of scale,
and I have been fortunate to be a part of that.
Today bKash serves over seventy million customers and growing.
The unbanked population that had no access to formal financial
services now has a wallet, a payment rail, a savings mechanism,
and increasingly, a credit profile. That is not a product
metric. It is a structural shift in how a country participates
in its own economy. Being part of this growing story as it
unfolds, helping manage product and campaign risks and govern
them responsibly at a scale without precedent, is no small feat.
My current role is Vice President and Head of
Product & Campaign Risk within the
Enterprise Risk Management Division at bKash.
I work at the intersection of every new product, every
campaign, and every AI-adjacent initiative, helping build
the governance architecture that ensures things scale responsibly.
The failure is rarely a missing framework.
It is a framework written for conditions
that no longer exist.
AI is the current version of that question and the most
consequential one. I am not a technologist. But I read
the field seriously: the capabilities, the failure modes,
the governance debates happening at the frontier. Because
the institutions I work with are already operating in
AI-adjacent territory, and a risk function that cannot
think clearly about AI is already behind. Western, Gulf
and Asian markets understand this more acutely than most.
The appetite for AI infusion in financial services is real,
and so is the growing awareness that the governance
architecture for it does not yet exist at the scale required.
The LITUp Framework emerged from fifteen
years of pattern recognition across retail banking, digital
financial services, and microfinance. The central question
was this: why do governance frameworks hold in stable
conditions and fail at the precise moments they are most
needed? The answer was shaped and enriched through seven
years of ongoing pro-bono applied work inside one of
Bangladesh's largest microfinance institutions, running
parallel to my full-time roles at Standard Chartered and
later bKash. The breadth of that engagement, spanning
product frameworks, risk management frameworks, process
universe design, pricing, communication management, a core
banking system PRD, and internal software development, gave
the thinking a live institutional surface to work against.
Four phases, each addressing what the previous phase
uncovered. The measure of success is whether the institution
can govern itself when the engagement ends, not whether
the engagement continues.
In addition to my work in the advisory space and role in bKash Limited,
I publish thought leadership content on LinkedIn and write longer-form here.
I am based in Dhaka, with keen interest in industries and regions where
institutional growth has consistently outpaced governance architecture,
and where the next decade of AI-driven disruption will make that gap
more consequential.