Our team

Raza Ullah is CEO and Founder of Pfida. A qualified actuary by profession, with over 17 years of actuarial experience, Raza has previously worked within consultancy at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he advised multinational blue-chip organisations on technical reserving processes and capital validation. He has worked in-house within the Lloyd’s of London marketplace as a technical capital modelling actuary utilising stochastic Monte-Carlo simulation methodologies to quantify risk based on thousands of calibrated possible outcomes.

He has further gained regulatory experience at the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulatory Authority where he was a risk specialist overseeing best practices across the industry for risk measurement and quantification.

Raza progressed rapidly through to senior roles within the London financial marketplace, having passed every actuarial exam first time and within 3 years (a very rare accomplishment). Consequently, he saw how different businesses work from the lenses of consultant, in-house specialist, and regulator, and across many different levels all the way up to high performing board rooms.

Raza gave up his full-time actuarial career in 2016 to pursue setting up and running Pfida and bring a revolutionary solution to a real-world problem.

Salman, known to many as Badrul, is a Director at Pfida. He is a Shariah scholar as well as a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales, specialising in Islamic banking and finance.

Salman was formerly an Associate in the award-winning banking and finance team at the international law firm, Simmons & Simmons, based in Dubai. He is a Certified Shariah Advisor and Auditor with the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) in Bahrain.

Salman has over 10 years of experience in English law and Islamic finance. He read law with LLB (Hons) at the London School of Economics after which he studied BA Shariah (Hons) at Al-Azhar University.

Omar El-Said is a Director and Chief Technology Officer at Pfida. He obtained a BSc in Mathematics from Imperial College London and an MASt in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. After graduating, he pursued a career in software development for several years, specialising in languages such as C++, Java and Python, as well as other cloud technologies such as AWS and Terraform.

Omar’s experience covers sectors such as Web Security, Security and Surveillance, Science, and E-commerce, working at companies such as PortSwigger, creators of Burp Suite, and The MathWorks, creators of MATLAB and Simulink. At PortSwigger, he helped develop the Web Security Academy, a free online web security training, and as such has gained valuable knowledge and experience in developing software with security at the forefront.

Azhar qualified as a chartered accountant with then global accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Following executive roles in internal audit and operational risk management at stockbroking firms Charles Schwab Europe and Barclays Stockbrokers, he was part of the founding management team of Islamic Bank of Britain, the UK’s first standalone retail Islamic bank.

His further roles have included CFO of Al Rayan Bank and CFO & Executive Director of Qatar Islamic Bank (UK).

Through these roles, he has significant experience of building finance strategy and operations in start-ups and developing businesses. Azhar is also an experienced charity trustee serving on the boards of a number of UK charities.

Forhad has an honours degree in LLB Law and shortly after graduation started his professional career in corporate social responsibility. After several years of managing and developing community development projects, Forhad moved into compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) in financial services where he developed his expertise and progressed up the ranks until he served as the Director of Compliance and the Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO) in several Fintech companies.

Whilst at Guavapay, Forhad moved into the role of the Chief Operations Officer (COO) and spearheaded organisational development by hiring key personnel for various departments within the business and building the whole UK team. Forhad also established systems and processes in all areas of the business to promote effective governance. In addition, Forhad also managed all Board meetings and initiated the development of Management Information (MI) reporting.