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Mohamed Abdel Razek, Group Head of Technology, Information, and Transformation at Mashreq: For a special Ramadan edition of our weekly My Morning Routine column that we will run through the holy month, we spoke to Mohamed Abdel Razek (LinkedIn), the group chief information officer and head of technology and transformation at Mashreq. We asked Abdel Razek the usual questions to find out how a successful member of the community starts their day and threw in a few more to find out how he adjusts to Ramadan and what he looks forward to in the holy month.
I’m Mohamed Abdel Razek. I’m a very passionate individual and a family guy. I’m professional in nature, and driven by a history of athleticism.
I don’t take my job as a day job. It’s an event and a learning experience everyday. My responsibility at the bank is to ensure stability and the resilience of infrastructure, and think strategically for the future. Every day I think, which problem are we going to face or resolve? And I take that astride.
I’m always thinking ahead about the future in terms of the pace of change of technology and how much we can absorb at the bank. That’s extremely important for me, because I have to try to regulate that, and not let the appetite consume us. There’s a lot of appetite, but from a corporate perspective, you have to be careful how you introduce and manage technology, and how you make it work safely.
There’s been a lot of trends and when trends are out, those are the buzzwords that run around town. First, it was blockchain, then crypto, then open banking, and those were the buzzwords at all of the conferences. Before that, the internet, web2, web3, then the cloud. The prevalent one now is artificial intelligence and machine learning, but that’s been around for quite some time.
My focus is on how to manage that change, and decide which technology to absorb, and which one to look at, but not take it in straight away — more like experiment with it on the fringe.
As a bank, we have a fiduciary responsibility in terms of protection of data, and protection of our consumer information. Technology is at the heart of that, so what we have to do is introduce the right technology to deliver a great client experience and service. But it has to be within the framework of what is regulated and what is being stipulated by the government.
In the UAE, there’s a huge movement towards open finance, so it’s not only open banking, which wasn’t really introduced to start with, but it’s now going a step further and they’ve jumped a stage from going from traditional to digital to open finance.
For my morning routine, I have an hour of reflection. I have two dogs — French bulldogs — and I spend the morning, from 6:30am to 7:30am, just reflecting and having pet time. My kids are grown up, and my wife is in portfolio [management], so she’s in and out of the country. So I take that time, have a coffee, and watch the news just to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Enterprise is great, because it’s very comprehensive, and there’s a few things in there that kind of set your day, and give you a view of what’s going on around the country, in the political scene, and in investment.
I take my first call at 8:15am with Pakistan because we have an hour ahead, or I catch up with team members on the phone while driving in. That drive in will either be to our Dubai Outsource Zone Office — where my team is and where I am most of the time — or to our head office, depending on my meetings. I like to come into the office and I seldom work from home.
My job is 24/7, so there’s no real wrap up, because I have to keep my eyes on what’s happening across the bank. We have East and West, New York — it’s a group role, so it’s not restricted to just UAE or just this time zone.
I run technology transformation and data for the bank at the group level. So, there could be many vendor meetings, where they show us new technology or new capabilities. Lots of time gets taken up in transformation, which is really focused on the big projects and big programs that are changing the bank, whether it’s a new channel for corporate, a launch in retail, or a regulatory approval to launch a software or an app.
That’s on a standard day. Of course, any day could be disrupted if there is an incident or if there is something to resolve. And those could happen. We do, approximately, a few thousand changes every week to our technology. Those changes could cause issues, so we make sure on a day to day basis that hygiene around testing quality [is solid] before anything is rolled in. Then I have the other part, which is my peer group interaction, which involves steering committees or executive committee meetings — that’s a monthly affair.
There’s also the people leadership aspect. I might walk the floor every other day just to say hi and to see how people are doing. It’s important to stay close to everybody and make sure that that connection is there.
I need lots of notes and planning to stay organized. And that’s different from calendaring. Planning is, what’s the message for that next meeting? What are we going to accomplish in the next hour? It’s hour by hour planning so that we’re engaging for output and outcome. I’m always thinking of next steps rather than just ingesting what’s happening around me.
The stress is relieved through sport. I’m an ex-Egyptian national squash player; I still play and compete. We play the Dubai League, so there’s a match every Wednesday, and we have three days of training a week. On other days, I’ll go to the gym. There has to be that physicality at least six days a week.
I take the word work out of work-life balance; for me, it’s just balance. Of course, if you ask my wife, she’ll tell you I don’t have a work-life balance [laughs], but I think I do, in terms of having time to plan, allocating time for sleep, good meals, athletics, spending time with family, — all of these are very important.
One good practice is not to get consumed by email. You can spend hours just trying to ingest everything that comes your way. You can use technology to filter what you need to respond to versus what you’re copied on, and use that to allow you more time.
For us, nothing changes in Ramadan except the announced hours of work. The hours stop earlier, but you do the extra hour or two anyway just to wrap up the day. We’re global, so New York is not really affected by Ramadan, the UK is not really affected. So, the UAE hours are one thing, but we have to observe a lot of cultures. It’s not just about Ramadan being here. It could be a festival in India. It could be something else in Egypt.
One thing that’s special, of course, about Ramadan is the additional spirituality — there’s a little bit more soul searching, a little bit more of that connection. And that’s also very important in life.
I’ve just joined Mashreq almost 11 months ago, and I want to grow the legacy. I want to do something here that puts a stamp on it for a very long time, especially in terms of advancing and growing the bank beyond borders. We’re growing the bank on both retail and corporate sides outside of the UAE. Our mantra is client experience, so, also, delivering a superior product across the globe, with the UAE and Dubai heritage, is something that I want to be part of and want to grow with my team. That’s what we’re all focused on, and the DNA is really around customer experience.
We’re growing in Egypt along the lines of mass retail and financial inclusion. We have a digital bank in Pakistan — and that’s the first of five digital only banks. We’re launching corporate in Oman. There’s other countries of interest on the road map. We’re changing our corporate stack, our trade, our payment rails — all of that is changing and modernizing to make the bank globally fit for purpose in terms of its infrastructure and its available technology.
I always tell our group CEO, we’re going from a marble to a basketball, and that means our surface area is expanding — no pain, no gain. There is a lot to gain, with a lot of work to get there.
I’ve been working for around 32 years now, so this next phase is about how I can prepare for more advisory work when I’m really done working, and I don’t put a number to it. It depends on many factors. But what’s next for me, personally is — I believe you go from success to significance, and that’s very hard, but I would like to look at more philanthropy or helping others rather than just relishing in money I’ve made or career opportunities.
I’m reading this book called No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention and I also recently met Jack Hidary, who wrote AI or Die. It’s all about grappling and experimenting with AI models, just like we do, but not bringing them to the core, unless they’re appropriately governed and regulated and introduced properly from a corporate side.
I watch a lot of Narcos-type shows, but that’s just out of interest in how that industry developed and persists, and their use of technology. They funded a lot of technological change, actually.
I had a boss, in the distant past now, who said “Mo, keep walking the straight line, and you confuse those who walk around in circles.” I’m very direct, and I like to leverage positivity in life and be honest and truthful. I don’t like to veer off of that line, so the best advice was to ignore those playing games or politics around you, and keep doing what’s right. Don’t get distracted by things around you, focus, keep going in your direction, and let everything that revolves in circles just come and go.
