Abu Dhabi – Information Portal

Coaches and Mentors – Google Startup Weekend 2016 Abu Dhabi

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Nihal Abughattas
Head of Marketing MEA at Temenos

Based in Dubai, Nihal Abughattas is currently the Head of Marketing for Middle East & Africa at Temenos, the market leading financial technology provider serving 38 out of the top 50 banks globally. Prior to Temenos, Nihal joined Fawry – a fresh startup at the time – as their Marketing Manager in 2008. In 2013, Mashable named Fawry among the top 15 startups to watch in Africa. The startup company has been valued at USD 100 million in 2015 and was among the top five acquisitions in the region in the Fintech space. Driving innovation in the regional Fintech scene and being a revenue-generated marketing professional with a passion for everything ‘Fintech’, Nihal is also involved with mentoring early stage startups in Egypt. A Fintech gender diversity report by Innotribe – one of Swift’s initiatives launched in 2009 – recognized Nihal as a Femtechleader in 2015.

 

Gaurav Dhar
Technology Entrepreneur & Manager at Payments Solution Provider Marshal Equipment

Marshal Equipment is the oldest Verifone partner globally, with 80-100% market share in over 15 countries in the region,  with all  of its IP developed in-house, based out of Dubai for the last 35 years.
Marshal provides complete payments solution infrastructure – ranging from card payment solutions to government programs, to loyalty, integrations at all levels, to fuel solutions and much much more.
The company looks to cater to, foster and work with payment solution innovators in the region by providing multiple opportunities, which can be in the form of not only collaboration and potential investment, but other forms as well depending on the maturity of the company and technology.
Our experience, having worked with global partners while building in- house solutions and catering to requirements of almost every segment of the payments infrastructure – allows us to review FinTech and its application + scalability in the truest sense.
Gaurav has been working at Marshal for over 11 years now on covering the day to day business, delivering solutions, building partnerships and ecosystems.
He personally leads the charge on innovation and with a view to the future of payments both locally and globally via his network and clients around the world which including VC’s, incubators, accelerators, and start-ups.

 

Natalia Wiechowski
The Middle East’s leading Renaissance Woman. Award-winning, bilingual Speaker, Writer, Coach, Vlogger.

Natalia Wiechowski, aka Think Natalia, is a Dubai based, award-winning, bilingual Speaker, Writer, Coach and Influencer who radically changed her life(style) and career after a self-imposed sabbatical. That is why people also call her the Middle East’s leading Renaissance Woman. After studying human behavior for over 12 years and spending almost nine months in isolation to find her purpose, the German social scientist (M.A.) and prospective Dr. phil. came to the conclusion that her mission is to help people become the best version of themselves. In other words: Help individuals develop and market themselves. This insight encouraged Think Natalia to develop a new, unique approach, which combines the most successful elements out of performance coaching, self-marketing and life coaching.

 

Jennifer Warren
Managing Partner at Pure Private Equity

Jennifer Warren is Managing Partner at Pure Private Equity based in United Arab Emirates.  Prior to co-founding Pure, Jennifer served as Senior Vice President and Head of Business Management for Treasury & Global Markets at First Gulf Bank in Abu Dhabi.  She previously held senior leadership positions in New York and London at Barclays Capital, Lloyds Banking Group and Lehman Brothers.  Jennifer began her career working in management consulting at Arthur Andersen and KPMG.  Jennifer holds a BSc in Business Administration from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

Tiberiu Iacomi
Founder of The Improbable Agency

The Improbable is a brand and PR agency for challengers, underdogs and misfits.

This is an agency for the companies – be them startups, SMEs or large companies – that find themselves in that inflection point where innovation in everything – from product development to operations and up to business strategy and communication – is key to their survival / growth.

The agency works with 12 companies from 3 continents and 6 different industries – ranging from e-commerce to IT and up to digital media and edtech.

 

Abdul Wahid
Senior UX Emirates

Abdul wahid is a Senior UX  at Emirates who constantly pushes the limit of front end by mixing bleeding edge technologies and proven design concepts. He started his career as a web designer and later worked on several front end technologies. Most of his time spent in designing, writing javascript, fixing problems and breaking things. Prior to JRD group he worked with several companies(including dubizzle.com, namshi.com).  As a technology lover and open source contributor he co-founded the Designers meetup and enjoys conducting workshops.

 

Chad Fox
Not-Your-Average Startup Lawyer

Chad is a startup lawyer, advisor and angel investor. He works predominately with high growth companies and their investors throughout the company’s life cycle  from incorporation to venture capital financing through to an exit. Chad understands startups and tailors his advice to each individual company by finding new and innovative solutions (including to how a company pays for his services).

 

Karim Helal
Founder + CEO @ ProTenders, Investor, Mentor

Karim is a life-long entrepreneur, having started dabbling in business when he was just 11, and only breifly interrupted by a stint in the Telecom world in Canada. Since his return in the UAE, he’s been very active in the enterpreneurship space, creating his succeful startup, ProTenders, investing in a wide range of early companies and mentoring at different incubators and accelerators. He is passionate about helping others succeed and not do the same hundreds of mistakes he did along the way.

 

Alberto Perez
Chief Development Officer at Democrance

Alberto is the Chief Development Officer at Democrance. Democrance’s mission is to democratize insurance by making it accessible and affordable to the low-income population in the Middle East and North Africa region via their mobile phone.
Former Founder and CEO at UAE based startups from the travel, entertainment and oil industries. More than 4 years leading the expansion of Spanish SMEs into Sub-Saharan Africa, implementing new digital strategies and disrupting mobile services in partnership with top mobile network operators in the region. Former consultant at PwC Spain. MSc in Computer Engineering.

 

Fraser Matthews
Director – Digital Financial Services at Tori Global

I am a Director of Digital Financial Services at Tori Global in Dubai.  I work with Banks, Financial Institutions and FinTechs to develop leading digital propositions from strategy to implementation.  I have experience in driving business growth, designing applications and platforms, developing products and features, and forming meaningful partnerships.

 

Hyder Mumtaz
Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) – Monami Tech

Technology entrepeneur. Involved in early stage / growth companies. Built out an e-commerce platform in MENA and achieved run rate of $12mn EUR within 6 months. Scaled out Doctoruna.com to 5 countries in MENA. Developed an alternative payments platform under Monami that works with 6 banks in Pakistan. Grew up in Lahore, Pakistan and studied at University of Pennsylvania / Wharton.

 

Maarid Fazili
Risk Manager at PAYFORT

Maarid specializes in eCommerce fraud prevention.

He started his career with Amazon Payments in the Globally renowned Transaction Risk Monitoring Service Unit protecting hundreds of small U.S based Amazon merchants from potential fraud attacks worth millions of dollars.

In an attempt to diversify his skills, he quit his comfortable position at Amazon & made the move to multicultural Dubai and was immediately deployed to take up the new payments department in Rocket Internet’s Namshi.com – Middle east’s biggest online fashion store. During his tenure at Namshi, he spearheaded the creation of SOP’s for payment monitoring, Chargeback process, managing dealings with Payment Gateway and over saw improvement in multiple micro projects.

After Joining PayFort, one of the first steps Maarid took was to completely revamp the way the Risk team operates introducing new SLA’s, KPI’s & SOP’s for various processes, reducing manual effort at each step. Now, managing over 1000 clients risk profiles & fraud prevention strategies, delivering training from startups to enterprises and initiating projects on a regular basis, Maarid likes to give himself leeway to explore exiting new opportunities.

 

Arunas Pigaga
Sales and Relationship Manager MENA at Checkout.com

Having experienced entrepreneurial life of e-commerce scene both in Denmark and UAE, I am well aware how important it is to make strategic decisions right from the start and to think long term in order to not impede business growth and its scalability. That is why I am currently helping startups and established businesses with taking the right decisions when it comes to online payment processing and digitalision of their services

 

Genny Ghanimeh
Pi Slice Founder & CEO

Following her passions for the MicroFinance & the Online industries, and after a life-altering trek in Kilimanjaro, Genny founded Pi Slice in March 2012 and negotiated a partnership agreement with MicroWorld from the Group PlanetFinance to build and administer the first crowd-lending platform for microfinance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Genny is a recognized voice, and a dedicated Author and Contributor in different outlets like Entrepreneur Magazine, Executive Magazine, Philanthropy Age and Pi Slice Blog, writing about Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneurship, Impact Investing, CSR and Microfinance. She is currently a Lecturer at London Business School, Hult Business School and Dubai Women Business Council; and a Founding Mentor at EMIR Program at London Business School and other Incubators like Afkar ME, Flat6Labs and UK-Lebanon Tech Hub. Genny also organized and launched CEO Talks interviews in partnership with Impact Hub and In5 Dubai, where she interviewed top Dubai CEOs. She is a regular Professional Speaker at events like CSR Summit, Global CSR Congress, SME Advisor Events, Bold Talks, WEF.

 

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