Muslim Money Talk
Introducing the Muslim Money Talk Podcast, a place for all things Muslim and Money related.
Every week we'll be sitting down with Founders, leaders and industry experts from across multiple disciplines to discuss lessons learned, mistakes made and most importantly 'How they did it?'.
Brought to you by Kestrl: The Muslim Money App, software to help Muslims grow their wealth without compromise. Find out more here: https://kestrl.io/
Muslim Money Talk
Interviewing My Dad: +40 Years in the UK, Career Advice, Being Muslim Post 9/11 | Ep 43 - Ayaz Siddiqui
In this heartfelt episode of Muslim Money Talk, host Areeb Siddiqui sits down with his father and Kestrl’s CFO, Ayaz Siddiqui, for an emotional and wide-ranging conversation about immigration, financial sacrifice, growing up in post-colonial societies, surviving personal loss, and the evolution of Islamic finance in the UK.
From humble beginnings in Pakistan to executive roles in global banks, Ayaz reflects on how faith, resilience, and mentorship shaped his journey — and why he ultimately chose to back his son’s fintech startup.
This podcast is hosted by Areeb Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Kestrl, the app that helps people to grow their wealth without compromise
Find out more about our app here: https://kestrl.io/
And how we help banks here: https://business.kestrl.io/
Show Notes:
00:00 - Opening
04:35 - Childhood in Pakistan and Military Life
12:11 - Zambia Years and Moving to England
22:13 - Life-Changing Loss at Age 18
35:11 - Breaking into London's Financial World
52:30 - 9/11 and Muslim Identity Crisis
1:10:09 - Mentorship and Career Evolution
1:22:32 - The Birth of Kestrel Financial
1:35:56 - Islamic Finance: Progress and Disappointments
But how did you feel when, after that, I said look, I want to do a startup.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I was shocked, I wouldn't say disappointed. I was shocked, and I was convinced that I was going to get you to change your mind.
Speaker 1:But what convinced you to then?
Speaker 2:join as a co-founder, I was concerned about protecting my investment in your school fees. I thought honestly, just because you're my son, I shouldn't deal you any differently from anyone else.
Speaker 1:But do you admit you kind of go harsher on me because of that.
Speaker 2:Parents of my generation sacrificed everything in their life so that their children could get a better quality of education, because that was the only way up for them. Opinion in the world is my life is divided into pre-911 and post-911. This is the first time I started thinking of myself as a Muslim.
Speaker 1:Today's guest is someone that I've actually known my entire life and for the longest time. He didn't want to come on the show, but alhamdulillah we managed to get him, so I'm very pleased to introduce you to my father, Ayaz Siddiqui. He has over 40 years of experience not over, but nearly 40 years of experience working in the city of London in financial services for major banks like Bank of New York, Royal Bank of Scotland and also a Bruce Stint at the regulator as well. He also happens to be our chief financial officer here at Kestrel.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to be discussing his life, how it was upended at quite a young age and how he ended up right here in the UK how life in Britain has changed over the last few decades and if the typical path to a stable life in what we assumed and what our parents always told us is still viable. I'll also be asking him his thoughts on Islamic finance in this country and how it's progressed, whether it's retreated a little bit and what he thinks we should be doing here at Kestrel. As always, I'm your host, arif Siddiqui, and this is Muslim Money Talk. Before we begin, we actually noticed only about 10% of you are subscribed to the podcast. So if you like what you're listening to and you want to hear more from us and see more things muslim and money related, then please consider subscribing and, of course, leaving this episode a like and share it with your friends, leave us a comment or a review, because it really really does help us out and help more people to find us. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Now back to the show. I'm gonna start off this by saying that I call my dad deader, and it's something that I've done my whole life, so it would be weird if I stopped doing that in this, so I'm just going to keep on doing that. That's fine. For some reason, you felt that no one wanted to hear from you, so you delayed coming on this podcast for a long, long time before you said oh, when we hit episode number 100, you'll appear on it.
Speaker 2:Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Yes, absolutely. Reeve has been nagging me for a long time to say you must come on the podcast, and I kept on saying no. And whenever he asked me the reason why, I said I don't think I have anything to say that would be interesting enough for people to listen to. But he kept on saying the opposite, that no people would be interested in your life story. So here I am.
Speaker 1:Let's see if I was right or you were. It's something I've always wanted to hear from you, and, I think, my brothers as well, because I think a lot, of, a lot of kids find it hard to relate to their parents, especially when those parents are immigrants to a new country. Because your childhood is very, very different to mine, um, and it makes it very difficult for me to think about the way I grew up versus the way you grew up, where your whole life was kind of upended. You had to leave everything behind and move to a place that was actually pretty hostile at that time towards people who looked like you and believed in the things that you did you know we'll talk about that in a minute, but here I think you're right.
Speaker 1:There's no comparison between the late 70s and early 80s, when I was growing up in this country having just come to the uk, yeah and the world that we live in now for people of your age so I think it will be very uh interesting for the audience to listen to your experiences in this country and before that in pakistan, and and uh, in africa as well, which we'll come on to um and I think to quote one of my favorite tv shows, succession. Uh, as conor roy says, sometimes I'll never truly understand my father until I had to go to the toilet outside. So yeah, without further ado. First question in Tell me about your childhood.
Speaker 2:I thought you may ask me that question.
Speaker 1:It's so starkly different from my own. You were the youngest of five children.
Speaker 2:It couldn't be more different. Yes, youngest of five, two, two brothers, two sisters older than me. And I often wondered later on in my life that, frankly, there was no reason for me to be in this world from my parents perspective because they had two sons and two daughters. Why on earth would they want a final, uh, fifth, child? But, um, you were born in pakistan.
Speaker 2:I was born in pak, pakistan, in a place called Kohat, very close to the border frontier with Afghanistan. Because my father was working for the military as an accountant, not fighting, but because he was based with the military. He used to be based on military locations and move around every few years from one location to another. So I was born in Kohat but grew up in a small place near Islamabad called Kohat, which was again a military contornment. Oh, I thought you grew up in Karachi. No, I went to Karachi later on in my life, in my early childhood. So from the age of one or two till the age of eight or nine, I was in Waha and then Islamabad and then moved to Karachi until the age of 12.
Speaker 2:So yeah, early childhood, growing up primarily in the north and then briefly in Karachi, where I went to a Catholic school called St Patrick's, and that's relevant because that got me into the GCSE as it is now, or all levels.
Speaker 1:So it was British schooling, it was British schooling, albeit in Pakistan. Was that quite common in Pakistan?
Speaker 2:It wasn't. It was something that was seen to be in a similar way to public schools in this country, something that's the privilege go-to. And I don't mind saying that I didn't come from a privileged background. We were very much middle class. My father was working for the government to begin with until he got a job working for the United Nations in Zambia later on in life.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to ask you about this because growing up, something you always used to say was that you had nothing. Growing up, you said you had one pair of trousers that your mother used to stitch back together and you had no shoes and had to walk barefoot.
Speaker 2:Perhaps I exaggerated a bit to make the point, but it is true that the life that, alhamdulillah, I was able to provide for you, ali and Farzan, is in the life that I had, with five children within eight years, with my father working for the government, and he was very much a role model, which I would like to talk about him briefly as well, because he was someone who was so straight in terms of his moral and ethical background that to succeed in a government job in Pakistan, you cannot afford to be straight ethically. What do you mean? The pay is never enough for people to live on it and, unfortunately, the same is true now as it was then that people used to take they wouldn't call it bribes, but basically they used to do things beyond the day job to earn a living. But my father wasn't like that. He was as straight as it gets in terms of his moral background and ethics, and he's really the role model that I've looked up to throughout my life when it came to any decisions on rights and wrongs.
Speaker 2:One example I'll give from my childhood is when I was going to school, I used to take a lift on the way back home with him and whilst waiting for him to finish work, I would go to his office and sit on the desk like this and do my homework. And once, whilst doing my homework, I picked up a paperclip from the desk and used it and it got the right telling off for stealing. Oh, just a paper clip from the office. His point was it didn't matter how small the item was, but it was government property and if I wanted something I should ask him for it rather than just pick it up because it's not mine and is that staunchness, that kind of incorruptibility?
Speaker 2:the black and white nature of the way he saw the world stayed with me throughout my life and whenever it came to key decisions in life, I basically went back to that background, which made it easy for me to know what the right side of being right was I'm smiling whilst you're selling this because it reminds me a lot of, uh, my brother ali, and the way he approaches a lot of things.
Speaker 1:So I wonder how much of this is taught and how much of this is genetic as well. Perhaps. Okay, that's very interesting.
Speaker 2:So, from the age of 12 onwards, we moved to Zambia because, as I said, my father got a job working for the UN, and that was really the first time in our life that we had a bit more money to spend, if you will, as a family. But even then it was barely sufficient for one or two of us to come to the UK to study.
Speaker 2:But wait, so Zambia from Pakistan were many people doing that at the time upending and moving to Africa, I have no idea how he applied for the job, but all I know is that, having never traveled anywhere in the world world and very rarely within Pakistan, we ended up taking a flight to Zambia and on the way we performed Umrah, alhamdulillah. In the 70s, no way Makkah was nothing like what it is now. It was like….
Speaker 1:No clock towers, no skyscrapers. Forget all of that.
Speaker 2:You could see the Kaaba from miles away and you could actually relate to it the way you would want to relate to it. What do you mean? Maybe a bit of a segue, but I honestly despair when I see the way maka, and especially kaba, looks now, especially when people go for umrah and most of the photographs are full of the clock tower etc. And even if, when they try and get the kaba, there's just so much noise around it in terms of the tall buildings etc. For me, the essence of kaba was the way it used to be, which was basically in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere, where you see tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people congregating and orbiting around the things around it and that.
Speaker 2:That really was the spiritual feeling you got, as opposed to what it is now, which is more practical and comfortable and air-conditioned yes, hotels walking a stone's throw away from it and shopping malls and food courts.
Speaker 2:It never was that anyway so going back to that time in my life we went to Zambia and I went to school there from the age of 12 to 16 to do my O-levels and frankly that was a struggle because I'd only recently joined St Patrick's in Karachi the O-level, so I wasn't fluent in English, I wasn't that good at my studies and so on, and immediately I went to a country where the medium of teaching was English. They taught in English.
Speaker 2:They taught in English and all the other languages was the local languageangya, which obviously I didn't speak, and I was given subjects which I had never done before, like what like bookkeeping and when I was keeping age 12 at age 12 what?
Speaker 2:yes, don't ask me why, because the other alternative bookkeeping, african history. Um, I had no idea what these subjects were, but somehow, uh, that experience taught me a lesson about starting from scratch, which came back to me a number of times in my life, and excelling in something which I knew nothing about. How did?
Speaker 1:your siblings, fiyaz Chacha, riyaz Chacha. How did they adapt? Because they were older. They were older. Did they find it more difficult?
Speaker 2:In some sense I don't speak on their behalf, but especially Fiyaz, being the oldest, was very much leading the way for the rest of us to follow when it came to our education. So he was the first one who came to the UK, for example.
Speaker 1:He left before you guys. He left before.
Speaker 2:In fact, he never went to Zambia, as far as I remember. He went straight from Pakistan to the UK, to university. To university and then doing his ACA like me, as did my older sister who did her master's, et cetera. And then the other brother, riaz, and then my other sister. So I was being the youngest. I was the last one to follow in the footsteps, if you will.
Speaker 1:You picked up English. You had to pick up English very quickly, whilst in Zambia you did your GCSEs there O levels, as it was called. O levels back then Cambridge overseas board Right, okay, and then at the age of 16?
Speaker 2:At the age of 16 I came to the UK to do my A levels because in those days that was the highest level of education you could attain in Zambia. You couldn't go beyond O levels. It was nothing. Really Absolutely forget university, not even A levels why was? That that's the way the education system was that the british has left behind them. We had only been independent for 10 years, but a young country young population.
Speaker 2:They wanted to get people working under a president called kenneth counter, who was the freedom fighter, if you will, who got them the independence, and they had a lot of corporate reserves and so on, but there was still quite a new young country that was finding its way do you remember much about zambia?
Speaker 2:I I have a lot of memories of zambia not necessarily all very good because unfortunately, zimbabwe was rhodesia in those days, yeah and was fighting for its independence, and there were a lot of so-called freedom fighters who were in zambia with a lot of security issues that were resulting from that, and even bombings from rhodesia in Zambia with a lot of security issues that were resulting from that, and even bombings from Rhodesia to Zambia, etc so I have memories of blackouts and bombing raids in the middle of the night, curfews sometimes then you.
Speaker 2:You were sent off to the UK to follow in your siblings footsteps, to follow in the siblings footsteps, with my parents staying there and with my eldest brother, fiyaz, being the head of the household, renting a house in a place called Dewsbury, near Leeds.
Speaker 1:Okay, so very different to where we are in London, very different from where.
Speaker 2:Yes, and there's relevance to Dewsbury in what happened later in my life, because Dewsbury happens to be especially the place in Dewsbury called Saviltown, because Dewsbury happens to be especially the place in Dewsbury called Saville Town, the centre for the headquarters if you like the markers of the Tablighi Jamaat in the UK.
Speaker 1:Right, perhaps Europe, I'm not sure For people who don't know what is the Tablighi Jamaat.
Speaker 2:Tablighi Jamaat is not a party like a political party as such. It is a missionary movement where it goes back to the basics of Islam. I don't want to represent them in any sense, but I'm sure I'm not doing a good job of explaining what they do. But their aim is not to try and preach to non-Muslims but to get the Muslims to come back to our core values first.
Speaker 2:So they'll knock on doors and say come visit us at the masjid and basically, all they ask Muslim brothers and sisters to do is to come and join them for a talk at the masjid and when people turn up, if they do turn up, quite often you get abuse at the door and so on. Used to be the case, still the case, and that makes you stronger because you're going. Were you part of them? I was part of them in the sense that anyone who lived in the area was encouraged to go and join them right even if it
Speaker 1:is for for a day three days or whatever, so you're almost like a door-to-door salesman, but selling the religion yes it's a bit like jehovah's witnesses in some sense that you would basically go with a group of three or four peoples to say oh we are, we are staying at your local mosque.
Speaker 2:Um, we're doing this speech. After I say'll say can you please come and join us?
Speaker 1:So this is Dewsbury in Leeds in the 70s.
Speaker 2:Dewsbury in Yorkshire close to Leeds in the 80s.
Speaker 1:In the 80s? Yeah, because I came to the UK in 97. So this will just set the scene for us. Is it Margaret Thatcher's Britain, margaret?
Speaker 2:Thatcher hadn't come in when I first came to the UK. Margaret Thatcher hadn't come in when I first came to the UK, but she came in within a year. So I went through all the things you may have heard about, like the winter of discontent where there were a lot of strikes going on in I believe 79, unless I'm mistaken but there were so many strikes like what you've heard about in Birmingham recently was throughout the country. The Binman strike. Yeah, basically everyone went on strike and bin men and post postal workers, uh, even train drivers and so on, so you couldn't go anywhere and, of course, the miners strike.
Speaker 2:The miners strike happened later yeah and in in the early 80s and mrs statue so you.
Speaker 1:You'd gone from pakistan, which isn't the most stable country, to zambia, which was facing all of these security issues. From rhodesia, yeah, to the uk and did you have an? Idea of these security issues from Rhodesia to the UK. Did you have an idea of what the UK was before you went there, or did you have this glowing idea of this amazing first world country?
Speaker 2:Or no, to be honest with you, reeb, in my days at my age of 16, 17,. I was a lot less knowledgeable than you, adi and Farzan are able to these days for a number of reasons, mostly because you have access to technology, etc. So maybe it was a good thing that I didn't know what to expect.
Speaker 1:You had no expectations about it, but it must have felt like just more of the same to you, like it wasn't or did it feel like more comfortable?
Speaker 2:Frankly, I was too focused on the immediate objectives of what I had to do, which is mostly to do with my studies.
Speaker 1:So you flew in basically immediately. You were engrossed in your A-levels.
Speaker 2:The only objective I had because, to save time, I joined halfway through the year and so on. And also because of our family background, money was important, so saving on school fees and college fees was really important and in those days, because we were all not British, we were Pakistani students. Subsequently, obviously, I became British. Tell me, what did you do at A-levels? So my A-levels were in accounts, economics and statistics Accounts, economics and statistics.
Speaker 1:So you basically wanted to follow in your brother's footsteps.
Speaker 2:I knew from before my O-levels that I wanted to be a chartered accountant because that's what my brother was doing. Because my father was a cost and management accountant, he wanted us to be chartered accountants, which was considered better then.
Speaker 1:So you saw it as like a safe profession. Did you ever consider doing like engineering or law?
Speaker 2:profession. Did you ever consider doing like engineering or law, or not really? Because in those days it wasn't a thing for you to think about. Oh, what choices do I have? What do I want? And so it is more a case of what do my parents expect from me, what can I do as quickly as possible without spending a lot of money, which makes you as much money as you can, which, which would give me a reputable job? And, yeah, the professional jobs in those days were quite clear, you know, being a doctor, a chartered accountant, not just any accountant.
Speaker 1:But you're not painting the scene for me very, because there's so many stories that you told us as kids of growing up in Dewsbury. Yeah Right, and what was it like? In that community Were you in like? Were there other Pakistanis Were there English?
Speaker 2:people In Dewsbury. In several towns the majority of the community was not Pakistani. They were Indians, mostly from Gujarat, Two cities in Gujarat, surat and Baroach to be specific. So very specific type of Muslim community there and I can't tell you how much I owe them in terms of my upbringing because the Tablighi Jamaat was just the other side of it. But the way the Gujarati community lived their life I'm sure they still do the same way is very much going back to the traditional values of Islam. They looked after the neighbors, literally. We were students living next to Gujarati neighbours so they made sure that If they asked about our welfare, if we didn't go to the masjid, they would come and knock on the door and say we haven't seen you for a few days.
Speaker 2:Are you well? If they knew that somebody was unwell, they would send us food etc. And when all of my brothers and sisters left so I was on my own, which happened quite soon after I arrived in the UK, I was literally living on my own in the same big house, because it was rent-free by those days. What do you mean? It was rent-free, so the landlord disappeared. What.
Speaker 2:I never found out why. The house was in a really poor condition, with the roofs leaking, etc. The heating broke down, so we had to use real firewood for the heating.
Speaker 1:Did it even have a real chimney?
Speaker 2:It had a real chimney which did catch fire once.
Speaker 1:So is this one of those terrace houses?
Speaker 2:It was the end of terrace house and because the student's rent was very expensive for us, we were so happy not having to pay the rent that we didn't question him on his lack of maintenance but it turns out the guy just disappeared off the face of the earth last I heard uh, somebody took over that property because it was abandoned or something you took us as children once to see the property and it was completely boarded up it was indeed derelict indeed, so you can see how long it took before somebody um recovered the property.
Speaker 2:Is it even still there? I believe it is. I think it's been renovated, yes, okay.
Speaker 1:We'll try and find it on Google Maps and put a picture of it here, Armin. Here we can. Okay, so you were living so.
Speaker 2:I grew up in that community and Pretty much on your own. Your siblings had gone On my own, living on the goodwill, frankly, of my neighbors when I was unwell and they really looked after me, etc. And yes, I mean, obviously we're going to talk about my mom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you, because she's such an important figure in all of your lives, but I feel, despite you guys, not having, unfortunately, being able to spend as much time with her because she passed away very early on, and I think that's another big difference between our childhoods in that you had to grow up very, very quickly so, by way of background, I've spoke about my father, obviously, yeah, and what I learned from him as a role model.
Speaker 2:My mother was remarkable for the time that she grew up in in terms of how strong she was as a woman, as a head of the family, in many ways, and what I mean by the head of the family is that she made all the critical decisions in the family for us not my father.
Speaker 2:She was the one who decided on our education. She was the one who sacrificed everything in her life so that she could pay for one or more of us to go abroad, etc. She was a remarkable woman in terms of her strength, her personality, her motivation for us to do well and indeed for my father to do well, because when she got married he wasn't fully qualified, he was part qualified and, frankly, his nature wasn't such that he would drive himself to qualify because he was happy with whatever he got. It was fine by him. But she was the one who drove him in his 40s to finish his qualification, become fully qualified accountant, which led to the job in Zambia. She was his ambition. She was Because she realized that without education she couldn't achieve what she wanted for the rest of the family and imagine having five children within eight years and making a life for us worth living in the sort of lifestyle that we had.
Speaker 1:And somehow she managed that thank you for listening to muslim money talk. If you like what you've heard so far, you might be interested in checking out what we do at kestrel, the muslim money app. Kestrel is a service that helps muslims who want to grow their wealth without having to compromise, whether it's on their belief or user experience or price. I founded Kestrel because of how fed up I was at how poor Islamic financial services were in this country. Often people didn't use them because of how bad the user experience or customer service and indeed, how high in price they were. So Kestrel was the answer to that.
Speaker 1:If you download the Kestrel app today, it can help you by creating a budgeting plan. Plug in whatever bank account you have and it will create a auto budget just for you. You can then tell us what goals you're saving for, and we'll save towards them automatically into pots and then, crucially, link you towards Sharia compliant investment and savings products as well. So download Kestrel today and try it out for yourself. Now back to the podcast. She sounds quite similar to my mother in a way to my way in a way, and that she is the one who pushed us to do a lot of what we ended up doing very much.
Speaker 2:So the main difference being that, obviously, with with your mother, my wife, uh, I was able to provide much more financially than was the case with my mother, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:So she had to make real sacrifices when it came to giving up on forget luxury, just basic necessities in life, so that we could get better quality of life and mostly education. And there's a theme behind this Parents of my generation sacrificed everything in their life so that their children could get a better quality of education, because that was the only way up for them. Unless you happen to be born in a rich family, which we weren't, education was the route out.
Speaker 1:And they would do everything possible, anything possible, to get them on the stepping yeah, yeah, so she passed away quite suddenly, but here in the uk she was visiting you guys. Yeah, so, yeah. So you're what?
Speaker 2:17 years old I was 17, 18, I think I was 18 then, uh, and I was, I'd, I'd done my a levels and I was doing my foundation course at leeds Metropolitan University. For accountancy For accountancy, which was required before. I already had the training contract from KPMG or Piedmont, because it wasn't those days, but I had to get at least a credit in my foundation course.
Speaker 1:So we should explain that a little bit, because it's really interesting and it follows a similar track that a few of our guests have done before, where, instead of going to a university and doing a full degree and then applying for a job, you basically found a scheme, A foundation course, A foundation course or something at a large firm which is now called KPMG a major big four.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was called Pete Marwick Mitchell Co in those days. Yeah, yeah, and you applied straight out of school yes, and because, frankly, my brother was already with the firm and it's the same then as it is now that obviously references are important, but they they asked for good.
Speaker 2:They saw my excellent a level results and a and two b's was really good in those days. I was disappointed I didn't get two a's and a b, but never mind. But they asked for a credit, not even a distinction. In the foundation course. I ended up getting a distinction. Just a month before my final exams, my mother, who was still in Zambia with my father on their own by then, came over to visit us in Dewsbury. We arranged for some medical checkups for her, not because she had any life-threatening illnesses etc. But because she had some long-standing issues with her health, such as high blood pressure etc. She was slightly overweight, so we just wanted to make sure that we get her a health checkup while she was here.
Speaker 2:She went to the hospital for the checkups and they did some tests and they admitted her for some reason, and one or two days after she was there all of a sudden, when Riaz Bhai was there my eldest brother he called me to say you need to come over quickly because she's really unwell.
Speaker 1:You were cooking.
Speaker 2:I was at home because we used to take turns in cooking, so I was in the house on my own. Riaz was in Bradford where he was studying, but then my sisters were back in Pakistan, so just the three of us were in Dewsbury. I wasn't to know then, but by the time he called she had already passed away.
Speaker 1:Did Fiyas return at that point?
Speaker 2:He did. He was with her at the end and he told me later on that she knew that her time had come and she explained to him what was happening to her. She did the Qalma Alhamdulillah, and she basically said something. Like her, did you know that your Ruh is taken from your feet, or something?
Speaker 1:She could feel the way her life was being taken away from her, etc. It just seems so shocking because she had come otherwise completely well and then went into the hospital and just deteriorated really, really quickly.
Speaker 2:Not just that, but as the youngest in the family I'm sure it's the same with most families you tend to be the closest to your mom, and I was very much that I was the last one to leave home. I was the one that was never allowed to go out to play when I was little, and so on, whereas my brothers and sisters would be playing out in the garden. And because of that, when that happened it was the biggest shock for me. But because I was living in several towns in Dewsbury, in that Islamic environment with the Tablighi Jamaat and so on, I was surrounded by people who basically told me as an 18-year-old that it wasn't right for me to grieve At all At all, let alone cry. Somehow. They believed it was wrong for me to cry because, alhamdulillah, she said the kalima, I should be pleased for her, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And frankly, that was a mistake, because I bottled it all up for a number of days until it all came out, so much so that the day after she died I had an exam a mock exam, not a final one and I went in and did the mock exams and I was slightly late going in, and when somebody asked me why I was late. I said, oh, because my mother passed yesterday. And they just looked at me and said why are you here? Why are you here for a mock? Yeah, but that's the way the mind works, that you just go into a state of shock. I managed to do my exams and so on, but that episode has stayed me for the rest of my life and, frankly I I don't think anyone can ever recover from the loss of your mother when you're so young?
Speaker 2:yeah, let alone when she's so young.
Speaker 1:She was in her mid-40s yeah uh, she would have been 90 or so by now, so she could perhaps still have been alive absolutely, I think, um, do you think it really changed you and made you the person you are today, and that you had to build up this resilience at such a young age which most people I mean? I don't think I could have coped at that age.
Speaker 2:It was a combination of events because one after another. So first she passed away, then my remaining brothers left me on my own before I had passed my exams, by the way, so I had to take both my professional exams on my own, studying on my own in that empty house with a roof leaking. They rushed back to Dalajan to your father. They went back because obviously my father was on his own. He left. Zambia to go to.
Speaker 2:Pakistan. After my mother passed away, he resigned from his job because they asked him to do so, because obviously there was no point. He was in a really bad state. He was young himself, he was in his mid-50s, and yet he felt that his life had ended as well, because can you imagine what a shock it was?
Speaker 1:for him, of course, and despite being so young, he never remarried.
Speaker 2:He never remarried and he thought at the time that his time was going to come within a couple of years or something which is normal for a lot of couples. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and yet alhamdulillah he lived till his late 70s and he had a full life. But that was a tough time. So the focus was on his welfare and my sister's welfare, who weren't married and they were in Pakistan.
Speaker 1:But you, as the youngest, you just sort of left your own devices.
Speaker 2:I was unfortunately I was in care of my neighbours. If you will, yeah, and you know, alhamdulillah I survived.
Speaker 1:But it was a tough time. You did more than survive. You thrived, mashallah, because you got this job straight out of school at a major accounting and auditing firm, something which is now KPMG. You completed a graduate scheme there, and then what happened next? Because, here's my recollection of what you've told me. Scattered throughout the years is that you managed to buy a house pretty early on.
Speaker 2:You were like 20 before, before I get to buying the house. So basically until I qualified with pete marwick, everything was done automatically, if you will, that you had your exams to take and you took the exam. You were promoted every year, every six months and every year and so on, by KPMG, by grade, et cetera, so you get to your qualification. The pay wasn't great then, by the way, so I started off on £3,300. A year. A year, what?
Speaker 1:is that today?
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's more now, but it's probably no more than £20,000 now or something. I'm sure somebody will correct me, but Okay, I don't think that's too dissimilar to a regional graduate scheme yeah, but it wasn't really a lot of money. Yeah, Even then, remember rents were expensive and mortgages were really expensive 7-8%, but it was more money than you'd seen before, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So I qualified and then I had to decide on what I would specialize in and that was the first good opportunity that came up, with the benefit of hindsight, where there was a new field that was called computer audit, which was never heard of in the 80s, was called Computer Audit, which was never heard of in the 80s. Pete Marwick was the test site for the Apple Macintosh. What?
Speaker 1:The original Apple Macintosh 1984.
Speaker 2:What do you mean? The test site? Okay, so Apple had to deal with Pete Marwick or KPMG, as it is now to test the new PC.
Speaker 1:What year was this? 1984., so this was Apple's first computer, first macintosh.
Speaker 2:Apple had other computers before right, but the mac as it is now evolved in the state without a separate monitor and a cpu as so, just this one self-contained computer one self-contained computer with a trailing wire which nobody had seen before, called the mouse.
Speaker 2:Okay, before that we were taught to use ibm pcs with jcl, job control language, so you had to type everything for commands, backslash, backslash, etc. There was no such thing as mouse, let alone windows and so on. So I was fortunate enough to be part of the team that was testing these brand new computers, which I remember still to this day. Opening the box out came out something and I thought we were missing something, because they were meant to be three things, not just two things, just the keyboard and the CPU, because we thought where's the CPU? We didn't know it was built into the monitor.
Speaker 1:And what were you doing with these computers?
Speaker 2:You were testing them, we were testing them to program what was called computer-assisted auditing techniques. So it was writing programming language to interrogate reports, basically as auditors, and that is what evolved into IT Audit later on. Okay, so you were basically, rather than having to manually recalculate reams and reams of computer printouts green and white pages that used to be in those days and so on we used to run interrogation against the programs to come up with exception reports etc. Okay.
Speaker 1:It doesn't sound as cool when you lay out what you were doing with it.
Speaker 2:But for the time to learn a new skill which was by default because, the alternatives I hated even more. I was in solvency, which I was interested, tax, which I found really boring, financial accounting writing reports. I never wanted to be a bookkeeper. I hated the frankly, so it was something as different as possible from what I was trained to do it was like the gen ai of the time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely, okay, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So I joined Deloitte, haskins Sells, got promoted to be computer audit manager and the relevance of that is that was a job in Leeds which got me the first job in the city in 1987. In London, in London. So that's when you came to London. So, yes, that's when I came to London. How old were you? I was 24, 25.
Speaker 1:24 or 20. So that's the same age I was when I left Deloitte.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I still remember how I found a job, because in those days the way to find a job for accountants was to look at the FT on Thursday, where there used to be a recruitment section where any job worth knowing was actually there in the financial times and you would literally apply for those jobs. So I applied for this job for one reason, one reason only because it paid double what I was getting. I was getting £12,500 in leads and it was offering £25,000 for a bank I've never heard of called Robert Fleming, and it was head of computer audit and somehow I managed to land the job. Was the interview difficult? I don't remember, to be honest.
Speaker 1:You don't remember getting on the train going to London. I?
Speaker 2:don't have any memory of that. All I remember is, when I first walked through the door, how impressed I was with everything basically being in London, being in the flashy offices that Robert Fleming's had. It's a very traditional Scottish merchant bank, as it was called in those days, so much so that they had the largest collection of Scottish oil paintings outside Scotland in its offices. They used to open the office as an art gallery over the weekend. Where was this? In London, Fleet Street.
Speaker 1:Coptel Avenue, next to the Institute of.
Speaker 2:Chartered Counties, 25 Coptal Avenue. That building has been demolished and rebuilt, but imagine 1987 having an office where in the basement you would have scotch courts and a swimming pool, so it was more of like a members club. Well, that was a facility they offered for the employees and they had an amazing canteen and they used to give you lunch and vouchers.
Speaker 1:Up until this point were you still living in that same dilapidated house.
Speaker 2:Until I moved down to London. I moved from Dewsbury to Leeds. I bought my first house in Leeds. So I tell the lie.
Speaker 1:So, so, yeah, so talk to me about this, because this is, I think, for a lot of the listeners, where buying a home at all, let alone in your early 20s, it seems so, so out of reach. But you bought your first house. It must have been you were 20 or 21.
Speaker 2:When I qualified, so 22.
Speaker 1:You were 22 years old, I was 22. You bought your first home in Leeds, and how much was that house?
Speaker 2:It was £25,000 and I got a 90% mortgage. Okay. Obviously, in those days there was no such thing as no islamic mortgage at the time, yeah, fine.
Speaker 1:And then you sold that house and you moved to london.
Speaker 2:I couldn't sell that house before I moved to london because I got the job so quickly. So for a while I was paying double mortgages which was really stressful okay, so I bought my first house in st albans okay, so north of london. North of london, yeah, because I knew st al Albans, because for a while I was living in Milton Keynes With a friend that I'd made from Dewsbury who was now living In Milton Keynes.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I knew. So, that community Was still benefiting you.
Speaker 2:The community was still benefiting and I was commuting Through St Albans, so I decided to buy a house there For 87,000 pounds, which was a lot of money in those days. What kind of house was it? It was a semi-detached house Okay, three bedrooms, but the commute wasn't great and the area in St Albans wasn't the best either.
Speaker 1:Really Okay, so it sounds like you got quite a bad deal.
Speaker 2:I got quite a bad deal and, most importantly, I hadn't sold a house in leeds yet, so it was a struggle yeah the interest rates being very high at the time.
Speaker 2:So I sold the house in leeds at a loss, just so that I didn't have two mortgages to pay. Okay. But having realized that it was difficult to commute from st albans, I then chose to sell that. I think I probably made a couple of thousand pounds profit on it. I I certainly didn't lose money and bought a two-bedroom maisonette in Chegwell for 66,000 pounds. So northeast of London, yes, but the reason being it was easy commute into the city.
Speaker 1:Oh, so this is the place I was born.
Speaker 2:That's the place you were born, which we still have.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So I want to ask you this question because when people grow up Morgan Housel is this great writer who's written books like the Psychology of Money and he often talks about how early experiences and the way your parents act with money, as well as the economy that you grow up in, really influences your attitudes and your ideas when it comes to wealth and buying homes, buying versus renting, that sort of thing. What influences did you have? Because it feels like you were sort of left on your own, to your own devices and just figuring stuff out as you went along.
Speaker 2:The biggest influence I had was how tight money was throughout my childhood and early life for different reasons, even when I was earning, because of high mortgage rates and rents and so on, especially mortgage rates, which is because I never paid rent. Um, you absolutely had to not so much budget consciously, but just live within your means, and my first memory of learning how to live within my means was when first came to the uk, fiaspa used to give me a weekly allowance of five pounds to cover travel and lunch.
Speaker 1:Was that enough?
Speaker 2:No, I was traveling from Dewsbury to Leeds to study where I was doing my A-levels, etc. So all I could afford most days was a KitKat and an apple for lunch. Kitkat was 10 pence in those days, but, but that was fine. That's all you would eat all day. I'm not saying that I suffered or anything, that I was used to. That that's what normal was right. You just learn to live within your means. So that was the sort of bringing where you try to save everything you earn because you never knew what you needed for, yeah, and there was never enough money to splash on things. So, for example, when I got an award for my performance in my A-levels a £25 gift voucher, I splashed out on a new pair of jeans, which was a luxury for me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's how we were introduced to the concept of money. If you will, that money is not to be taken granted. You have to value your savings to make sure that you can live with, of course, and the sort of borrowing was never there, but aside from the mortgage aside from the mortgage, but not not in terms of car loans or persons you basically even when I bought the first car, I got a loan from riaz by do you think that's made you quite conservative in your attitudes towards money today?
Speaker 2:I think as an accountant you're trained to be conservative in your life and outlook on life and savings anyway, so you always look at the half glass empty rather than half glass full, you always look at the worst case scenario, etc yeah so that, together with my upbringing, got me into the stage where I've always been, as you know, quite risk averse and then you were.
Speaker 1:so you're in london, you're in roming's, that's, I think, where you met James Bagshaw as well no, Indeed the famous James Bagshaw James. Bagshaw is one of our advisors here at Kestrel. He's a good friend of the show and the firm and one of your oldest friends as well, one of my oldest friends, in fact he's my oldest friend.
Speaker 2:We were part of the initial audit team in Robert Fleming's in 1987. And then, a year later, andrew McGovern, who you have also met, joined us and we've been friends ever since.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. So there's many funny stories we can tell on that, but I think we'll save that for a different episode. But you bounced around quite a bit then, because you were in Robert Fleming, I know you went back to Karachi. Obviously. You met mama. You got married.
Speaker 2:No, well, before that there was some interesting stories. So, talking about having very little money, all of a sudden I was getting double the salary at Robert.
Speaker 1:Fleming yeah, so what did you do?
Speaker 2:That was an exciting time for me, and not just that I was given a company car or an allowance of 25,000 to buy any car I wanted.
Speaker 1:What On top of your salary.
Speaker 2:On top of the salary, and I was given a mortgage subsidy as well. That's the reason why I could buy it.
Speaker 1:That's the reason why I was able to buy it.
Speaker 2:So those days those things were not taxable.
Speaker 1:These days it's a completely different story.
Speaker 2:So, given that I was young and I had always driven boring cars like a Toyota Corolla and a Ford Sierra, I splashed out on a Toyota MR2 sports car with an open top Right. Okay, and that was an amazing time that I had, because I'd never had those sort of luxuries. And it didn't last very long. Just for a few months I drove that and then I got this amazing offer of a job from a bank in Bahrain, so I resigned.
Speaker 1:And Bahrain for people who don't know. Back then in the GCC that was kind of what Dubai is today. It was kind of the center of financial services in the Middle East.
Speaker 2:I think it's unfair to Bahrain to compare it with Dubai, in the sense that Dubai has always been a well-established financial services center in the Middle East.
Speaker 2:It's not a location like Dubai or other locations. That has come up in a short while and tried to get up to speed. Bahrain has always been recognized. Try to get up to speed. Bahrain has always been recognized. Obviously, the history of Bahrain is about natural pearls and pearl diving and all that, but then for a long time it's been recognized as a financial services center, well before Dubai, let alone Abu Dhabi, and so on, for being the center of finance in the Middle East that excelled in designing its model on the English legal system, regulatory system, etc.
Speaker 2:Which is quite a smart thing to do when you're trying to attract foreign business it was, and the reason was, frankly, because the royal family was influenced by the British and they had a lot of British connections, they were educated here, etc. So there's a bank called gulf international bank that I managed to get a role and because it was tax-free in in those days, as probably still is. So I I got a pay rise, which is important to try and save money, and that was the objective. I had to try and save money so that I could get married okay, so you.
Speaker 1:So you saved up enough, Obviously. You then got married.
Speaker 2:So, because I was in those days, the only concept of marriage was arranged marriage. Yeah, and what that meant for people of my generation was you had to go back home to Pakistan.
Speaker 1:But Karachi, because that's where your family was now settled. The family was now settled.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my father, riyaz Chacho, fiyaz Bey, was in Saudi by then, etc.
Speaker 1:What was different about Mama or Mama's family?
Speaker 2:As you know, their background is so different from my background in the sense that, you know, with both her parents being quite well off in comparison to my family, if, if you will, they had lived a different lifestyle. They traveled a lot, especially with my father-in-law working for an airline where they used to get free or cheap travel and so on. So, although, um, she wasn't educated in the west and so on, I could relate to her because by then I had you traveled a lot I spent half my life in the west so I was looking for someone who was similar to me, who wanted to travel, who wanted to travel, who was potentially happy to live in the west.
Speaker 2:But at that stage, the thought wasn't for us to live in the uk. The thought was for us to settle in the middle east so you got married very quickly.
Speaker 1:I know you rushed the wedding.
Speaker 2:Got married because that was the time of the first Gulf War where. Iraq had invaded Kuwait, so all the foreigners were asked to leave Bahrain for their safety, because Bahrain was an American base. Bahrain had an American base, as it still does, and was within striking range of the Scud missiles that Saddam Hussein had. So, for their own safety, the foreigners were asked to leave.
Speaker 1:So GIB said sorry, you need to or they gave you the option.
Speaker 2:They gave us the option. I don't think it was an option. I think all expats were asked to leave and the locals basically working from home or whatever their plan was in those days. So, earlier than expected, I went back to Pakistan with nothing to do. So I decided that it's best time to get married, got married, went back to Bahrain and within three months the actual Gulf War started, as opposed to the invasion which had preempted that of Kuwait.
Speaker 2:So at this stage, the foreigners were asked to leave permanently because the war was about to start. I don't know if you are aware that the first Gulf War, America had given a deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait or else it will be invaded.
Speaker 1:So Iraq had invaded Kuwait. They had ground forces in Kuwait.
Speaker 2:Iraq had invaded Kuwait and had ground forces in Kuwait and had occupied Kuwait for six months or so. And America gave us an ultimatum.
Speaker 2:America gave us an ultimatum you must leave by from memory 15th of January, or else we will strike you. So you got out. So, basically, because everyone knew when the war was going to start, because Saddam Hussein wasn't going to back down, we got out. And then the choice was either going back to Pakistan, To what there was no job or anything or going back to the UK. And that's where you went, that's where we went.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then, about a year later, I was born.
Speaker 2:A year after we moved back to the UK you were born. Yeah, the first few months were, frankly, very tough because I didn't have a job to come back to. We came back for the reason that I mentioned, our safety, booked everything we had in the house in a massive container, including a left-hand drive bmw because there was space there and came back to the uk in the middle of one of the worst winters, with um snow up to two or three feet high. This is 1990 1990.
Speaker 1:1990. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And frankly it was a struggle to find the next job Went for a lot of interviews. What I realized then which may be true to a certain extent now is the time I had spent in the Middle East or in Bahrain was considered completely irrelevant for the future employers. People did not value, they did not the experience. Completely irrelevant for the future employers. People did not value, they did not the experience you gained in the Middle East. The preconception, or misconception, was that if you go to the Middle East, you have a good time. You don't really learn anything new, which wasn't true then and isn't definitely not true now, but it wasn't taken seriously. That, okay, you know, nobody has heard of the bank I was working for Right.
Speaker 1:They didn't respect the quality of work that you were doing. It's so interesting because this kind of prevails now. I remember when I was doing my MBA and we were applying to different grad schemes or consulting schemes around the world. The ones in highest demand were the schemes in the UK and in the US, and it was always easier to get into somewhere that was in Dubai or Riyadh or Jakarta or somewhere like that, and generally it was understood that gaining experience in a firm over there would not equate to the same level of experiences in the West and would not be seen the same. And even if you, some people had a plan oh you know what, I'll start working in Jakarta and then I'll be able to transfer over to london. But it was never quite that simple because often when they tried to transfer over they had to take like a pay cut or a reduction in job title or something of that nature. So it does still kind of prevail. Yeah, I mean I'll be honest with you.
Speaker 2:There were a number of expats in bahrain that I remember clearly, who were clearly there for one reason only, which was make as much money as possible in a little time, not pay any taxes and do as little work as possible I mean, if you can get away with it, true, but you know the way I was brought up.
Speaker 2:That wasn't right, yeah, and then just didn't sit well with me. So I worked the same way there as I did in the uk, which got me recognized in many ways. I took some risks with my auditing work and so on, like a famous example I recall was where I was auditing the accounts receivables area that was responsible for purchasing, and there was a concern that they may be giving favourable treatment to a certain supplier, treatment to a certain supplier. So I got one of the interns who was a Saudi to masquerade as a Saudi prince and pretend to be someone who is trying to get around the rules to get a contract signed Just as part of my audit test. I'm sure I wouldn't be allowed to do that these days.
Speaker 1:And did it work? Did you uncover this? Corruption yes, yes, we, we did, but let's not go into that uh, you brought it up okay, fine, fine, so we can't go into that, but I want to fast forward a little bit because we're running a little bit short on time. But you arrived in london, you've become a father and you're kind of at the point of your life, similar to where I am now, and I always relate to this because I think you and I became fathers at the same age I think I was 30.
Speaker 2:You were 30. Yeah, you were born the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, same time around the same time into the marriage or all of that. Um, and it was in a very different time in the uk, because I'm old enough to remember being in the uk where there were a lot of places you could go where no one really knew what a Muslim was. People would see you by the color of your skin first.
Speaker 2:So, going back to when I first came to the city in 1987, absolutely there were days, perhaps weeks, where I wouldn't see another brown face, let alone a Muslim, except when, for Jummah, I would go to Brick Lane, which was still there.
Speaker 1:Brick Lane Masjid was there. The same masjid was there.
Speaker 2:Okay, absolutely. There were far fewer restaurants than there are now, but there was definitely one that I used to frequent after Jummah prayers Pepe's Not Pepe's Pepe's wasn't there, but it was close to Pepe's. It was a Pakistani restaurant, the traditional one, where you got your own water from the tap Right and we used to get the chicken biryani, which didn't do much for my waistline, okay, but that was the only time you would meet other Muslims.
Speaker 1:Right, Otherwise you were just surrounded by….
Speaker 2:Muslims in the area were all not that well educated, unfortunately, but not considered good enough to work in the city. It was not just non-muslim, but not just white, but very british, upper class, upper class, british traditional merchant banking world did you feel that you stuck out like a sore thumb?
Speaker 1:did you find it hard to relate to these people?
Speaker 2:so one thing I wanted to point out in this conversation is that I'm I've often been asked in my life about things like discrimination and how I felt and so on, like you're asking me now and I've always found it difficult to answer that and I've wondered why was it? Because there wasn't any? Of course there was, but the reason is and I've thought long and hard about it because the mindset of my generation was so different. We almost expected to be discriminated against. Don't take it that literally. What I mean by that is we never expected to be treated the same as anyone else from day one. That's just the way I was brought up. It was a privilege for me to be in this country.
Speaker 2:The way I felt perhaps because my background being a pakistani student and so on on not having to pay school fees and so on yeah so when it came to later on in my career, where I was working towards a certain promotion and so on, I never thought about fairness, of being treated equally. I always felt I had to be not just better but perhaps 10 times better than anyone else to get noticed, to get noticed, and I didn't think about that grudgingly, it was just a fact of life. It was a fact of life which I assumed is normal for people of my background, that of course I have to be better than anyone else, otherwise who am I to be in this company, company of people, the firm, etc. To have the privileged job that I had?
Speaker 1:and so but it forced you to strive for excellence. It forced me, forced you to strive for excellence.
Speaker 2:It forced me not just to strive for excellence. It forced me to always keep on learning new skills. Because one thing I recognize the reason why I qualified as a chartered accountant is because I was always told become a chartered accountant and you're made for life. The world is your oyster.
Speaker 1:Your father told you that.
Speaker 2:your brothers told you that yes, absolutely, which was true to a certain extent initially in my career. But after five, six years or so I realized that I had hit a ceiling where for me to progress further than a computer audit manager, if you will, or head of computer audit, which is what I became in the prudential, my first job back in the UK, and so on I had to learn new skills, and the first new skill I learned was at Prudential, which was asset management. Again, just like going back to the 80s where I learned about IT, computer audit and so on, it was only because there was a need for me to get promoted that I had to find something that would make me achieve that objective.
Speaker 1:And this was riding off the tailwinds of Thatcher's big bang where she had deregulated a lot of wealth management and investment banking.
Speaker 2:She had deregulated and she had been in power for over 10 years by then. And the big change since her first I first started in the city in 87 was that, following the big bank deregulation, a lot of non-british banks were coming in, initially for the swiss ubs, famously sbc, and then the american banks came in and so on. So the whole of the face of the city changed in the 90s because of the deregulation.
Speaker 1:And I've always thought that the biggest beneficiaries of that were the investment bankers and the traders. But then I guess there's of course going to be downstream impacts for the auditors and the compliance people who are now rushing to try and make sure the checks and balances are still there. So, that came much later.
Speaker 2:So the 90s was very much the Wild West in many ways, because the deregulation had gone too far, yeah, where the American banks came in on the back of the Swiss banks and basically started doing things that, frankly, were later found to be not right, of course, and made a lot of money. And made a lot of money. Now I benefited from a career perspective because, on the back of me specializing in asset management, I was headhunted by SG Warburg, which at that time was the most reputable English merchant bank, if you will, where it was so traditional that anyone who joined that felt that it was. It was like Oxbridge of the banking world and they wouldn't recruit outside Oxbridge. So you'd ask me why they took me.
Speaker 1:How did you get in?
Speaker 2:Because they were looking for someone to head up their wholly owned subsidiary called Mercury Asset Management. Right, which was SG Warburg, was an investment bank, but it owned a fund manager called Mercury Asset Management, which was subsequently taken over by BlackRock. Oh, so this is why you say what you always say you can say it now I know you're itching to say it that I'm a blackrock alumni.
Speaker 1:I used to be head of audit for no, you said you were like one of the first employees of blackrock, which is true.
Speaker 2:So I was headhunted by sg warburg but going back to your questions about the interviews, I do remember my interviews at SG Warburg. What were they like? Because they were so traditional. They used handwriting analysis, amongst other things.
Speaker 1:Really, yes, so that kind of analysis which tells people if you're a psychopath or a genius, or the reason was they used the same expert for analysis of handwriting for the last 40 years, until she died, and then they stopped doing it.
Speaker 2:She was so good at it that there were cases and cases of people who, 10 years later, was seen to be exactly what she predicted what did your? Handwriting, say I don't know, but all I know is that I got through. I didn't have an amazing handwriting, but whatever it was was good enough and you said you were surrounded by all of these.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to be frank here Oxbridge types, I'm guessing older male English.
Speaker 2:Very much so. And not just that Most of them had degrees in English, english literature, those type of subjects, so you can imagine the background. Classic, yeah, classics, right.
Speaker 1:And because of that. Which your own son of course, went and did classics, Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And you were taught basics like we used to type in those days. But you were taught how you must always use Times New Roman font size 12 and make sure that every paragraph started with one tab and make sure you have one space after a comma and two spaces after a full stop, or else you'll be publicly humiliated for making mistakes.
Speaker 1:It's weird because I had to do the same at school, so I don't know. That's exactly what I was taught as well.
Speaker 2:So that was taken so seriously? It was part of the discipline of being good at what you did.
Speaker 1:You must know the basics of that. I wonder where that comes from. Okay, that's interesting 's interesting. So, okay, this is all happening in the 90s, happening in the 90s very quickly.
Speaker 2:Sg warburg was taken over by svc, which was then taken over by ubs, became ubs warburg.
Speaker 1:So you're moving all over the city absolutely, but I want to because so far we've been talking around it, yeah, where you're a brown man in the city, um, you said you didn't really feel discriminated against and you were kind of just happy to be there in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2:But then something happened right and I remember coming home from school and turning on the tv and watching a plane fly into the first of the two towers to fall in new york so I was working for an american bank called Mellon Bank, which subsequently became Booney Mellon Bank of New York Bank of New York Mellon and I remember being at my desk with the TV in the corner with 9-11 happening and initially, as with many people, people thought it was just an accident, maybe a plane, a small plane, has flown in. Nobody realized the significance of what was happening.
Speaker 1:Until the second plane.
Speaker 2:Not even until the second plane, frankly, because, yes, people were shocked, but what I mean by significance is how much impact that would have on the world Within days. People are talking about this is going to take 10 years before the world. Obviously, the world has never been the same since 9-11. People are talking about this is going to take 10 years before the world. Obviously, the world has never been the same since 9-11. In my Opinion, the world, my life, is divided Into pre-9-11 and post-9-11.
Speaker 1:Really, absolutely. What was the biggest Change you?
Speaker 2:noticed. This is the first time I started thinking of myself as a Muslim, Believe it or not. I was a practicing Alhamdulillah. I used to do five times prayers because of my background in Dewsbury and Tablighi, Jamaat and so on. But people of my generation never thought about the religion in the same sense that Alhamdulillah you do. We took it for granted. We are born a Muslim in a Muslim country. Of course you're going to go to heaven, Do your five times prayer, go for Jummah, do the basics, but we got on with life.
Speaker 2:After 9-11, I was forced to think deeper about what it means to be Muslim because we had to take sides. It started from traveling, as I often had to, to the US where I had to go through immigration, especially at GFK, and I can't tell you how painful it was to always be the one person who would be stopped for questioning and it wasn't just questioning at the desk. You were taken to a separate room where, basically, you could miss your connecting flight because they wouldn't tell you how long it would take. You couldn't use your phone you had mobile phones in those- days.
Speaker 1:I remember once you told me you were stuck there for like four or five hours.
Speaker 2:They just left you in that room, absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's not like they were questioning you or anything, they just left you.
Speaker 2:Well, they did question me and then they would ask you to go back and so on, and the question, frankly, didn't make. The questions sometimes would be about the names of your parents, the names of your grandparents, which, as you know, is difficult.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most people don't know Dates of birth, etc.
Speaker 2:And then the most difficult questions were about what do you do? I was honest. I work for the bank. Why are you here? Because I have teams reporting to me in Boston and New York. And when I said that, he said they've got people reporting to you Couldn't they find an American to do the job? How do you respond to that question?
Speaker 1:I guess not. You just keep quiet.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't easy, but I had to do it.
Speaker 1:So then of course 7-7 happened here in London 7-7.
Speaker 2:Happened in 2005. By then I'd been promoted further in my job so I had more responsibilities. Happened in 2005. By then I'd been promoted further in my job so I had more responsibilities including, most importantly, being responsible for disaster recovery for the bank in for the london office disaster recovery indeed.
Speaker 1:So I remember this day rick I this is I was in year eight, I think. At the time, um, and I just remember, I think it was like first period the teacher came in and made an announcement and said look, there is something going on in London. We don't know much, but we all went to the computer room at the time to check in I'm really showing my age, some of the younger viewers. We didn't have smartphones or anything, we didn't have internet. So we had to go to the computer lab to log in and check the news and I remember calling Mama and there was just this kind of like not panic, but this weird sense of dread in that we couldn't get a hold of anyone in london because I think they'd cut the phone lines.
Speaker 2:Absolutely I don't think they'd cut the phone lines but they were blocking the signal. I think so many people were trying to make phone calls that the system no one was getting through.
Speaker 2:All we had known is that something had happened underground, absolutely so what had happened was fortunately, I was still in the habit of getting in early at work. Had I been 10 minutes later, I would have been within 100 yards of one of the bomb blasts in all gate east. So I was in office when the first blast happened, and then the second, third and so on within, I think, half an hour. And after 9-11, the concept of something called evacuation had already come in, which is the opposite of evacuation, which was when there's a scenario like 9-11, which that was deemed to be rather than go out on the street. That was deemed to be rather than go out on the street. As people realized in New York, that was a mistake. You go in to a safe place in the office, so we had a basement where everybody could gather safely.
Speaker 1:Everyone in the building.
Speaker 2:Those who were not everybody was around.
Speaker 2:It was still quite early some people weren't coming, so as many people as possible would go there or to another safe area inside the office, basically, rather than going outside and then leave as and when they could. Now, because I was manning the hotline which was set up for people to call to ask what was going on and so on, and taking roll calls of who was where, who was safe, who was not, we had to make sure that everybody was accounted for, etc. I was the last one to leave and by then no trains were running, no buses were running.
Speaker 1:I remember walking for two or three hours was it just like a whole herd of people walking?
Speaker 2:by the time I left, the place was deserted, so you just walked through london I was walking in the direction of home without having any idea, so you walked towards Stratford. Walking towards Stratford. I don't remember. I may have hopped onto a bus. I do remember getting to your school by 8 pm or something, I think there may have been some event going on perhaps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a school play which I was meant to be in and then I pulled out of last minute.
Speaker 2:I remember it was something that I was aiming to get to. I remember I did make it eventually, yeah, and I was determined to walk if I had to. All that way. I didn't do it in the end, I just pulled out, I think so, yeah, now 7-7 in many ways, for me personally, was worse than 9-11. Yes, not Not many people may remember, but two weeks after 7-7 happened, something happened which was a copycat of 7-7.
Speaker 1:I know about the man who was shot down.
Speaker 2:There was a Brazilian man who was trying to, so there was something that was similar to 7-7, which happened two weeks later and in the intervening period, because of what had happened with the background of Muslims who came to the underground looking like commuters with backpacks, anyone who looked same or similar was a suspect, not just in the eyes of the police authorities, but your fellow passengers, the police authorities but your fellow passengers. So it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to go to work or feel comfortable traveling, because people were looking at me when, two weeks later, that event happened, which was a copycat. There was another bombing.
Speaker 1:There was another attack Attempted Right. They were caught.
Speaker 2:They were caught and that Brazilian was shot dead mistakenly and so on, because they suspected that he was part of that. He wasn't. I was actually in Hong Kong on business and when Mama called me and told me about what was going on and I remember her saying to me that we need to try and get out, we can't live like that and the reason was because she had been attacked in the local Tesco.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I was there. Yeah, you were there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Where somebody, I think.
Speaker 1:I think he was drunk. Yeah, he was following us around. We were all quite young and Fazan was a tiny baby as well. Yeah, absolutely At the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that was such a shock and I felt so helpless that I couldn't protect my own family. So I came back to the UK and I was determined to leave. I said it's a mistake. I thought we could survive after 9-11. Things are getting worse. I just need to find some way out for me and my family to get out from here and be in a safe environment, Because I can't explain to you how uncomfortable life was for a lot of Muslims in the city at the time, and that's when I went to see Iqbal Khan.
Speaker 1:So Iqbal Khan. So for people who don't know, iqbal Khan is one of the founding members of Islamic banking in this country. He is responsible for setting up HSBC Omana, which was HSBC's first ever Islamic banking window right here in the UK, and today he runs Fajr Capital, which is a major Sharia compliant fund based in the UAE. And I met him recently in Dubai where we won the EFICA Abu Dhabi Islamic Banking Awards and he was giving a keynote speech, so you knew him back then.
Speaker 2:I had first met him when I was in Jersey working for Lazard Bank, where Jersey in those days I'm sure it's changed now didn't have any prayer room, let alone a masjid. So I set up a place where we could do Jummah prayers, like halls for Jummah. For that time, if you will, and because there was no imam, I used to lead the Jummah prayers and he happened to be there on business and he asked around where to go for jumah and that's how we met okay, 1998, I believe right. So I sort of kept touch with him since that time and, and you know, knew what he was doing.
Speaker 2:I knew what he was doing and obviously, even then, you know, he was someone that I looked up to, yeah, and I respected him and I thought, okay, given his background, I would seek his counsel on where to find a job in the Middle East. It wasn't a case of should I or shouldn't, it was more a case of okay, I've decided to leave. Can you introduce me to someone? Where shall I go?
Speaker 2:Where shall I go? Yeah, someone in Dubai or Bahrain or where have you. So I went to see him in his offices in HSBC, I remember, I think in Narybof, yeah, and I still remember that meeting very clearly for a number of reasons. So when I met him, I told him about my reasons for being there, how I felt after 7-7. He obviously sympathized with me, empathized as well. A lot of Muslims are going through. But he said listen, can I give you some advice? I said yes, please, that's why I'm here.
Speaker 2:He said I met a lot of Muslims like you who are doing very well professionally, alhamdulillah. They are in good firms, doing a good job. But one thing I find is that before they get to the very top, they leave for one reason or another it could be family reason, or they feel they're not good enough, or what have you but they don't really stay long enough to make it to the top. And because of that, we don't have many role models for young Muslims. We don't have many role models for young Muslims. So promise me one thing you will stay in this job until you get to the top, so that you can become a role model for young Muslims. And he said I've got one more request. I said, sure, I thought it would be something job related, specializing in what have you, and so on. But no, it wasn't. He said promise me that you will never miss a Fajr prayer. And I looked at him and I was surprised.
Speaker 2:And frankly, I wasn't regulated by Fajr prayers like many Muslims at the time, especially in the summer. It was difficult.
Speaker 2:You would sleep through the Fajr accidentally otherwise and then do Qadr and so on. But he said make a point of always making sure you wake up for Fajr. And I didn't even ask him why, but I just felt that if it is important for him to give me that advice, I should follow that. And to this day I have been grateful to him for both pieces of advice, but especially the second one. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the reason why he said that was quite simple If someone never misses Fajr, obviously they're not going to miss any other prayer as well. Also, the barakah you get from waking up at Fajr, as many of us have realized I wish I could take more advantage of it than I do is waking up at that time, having a fresh mind, starting for work early, et cetera. So I'm still grateful to him for those pieces of advice that he gave me Gosh.
Speaker 1:He gave me some very similar advice recently in Dubai, which I'll leave for another podcast because it's not about.
Speaker 2:it's not about this but it was compelling enough that got you to say, listen, I'm going to stay here in the UK so I decided that I'm not going to leave, which in many ways was good in the sense that I stayed until I got to the top. I became an MD global head of audit for asset management, I stayed, and with the merger with Bny Mellon happening and so on, as a lot of people lost their jobs and so on, so I was at Bonny Mellon or Mellon of Bonny Mellon for 10 years got to the top as an MD, but in some other ways it wasn't good because my focus became very narrow within internal audit as head of audit, albeit asset management et cetera.
Speaker 2:But at least I achieved what he was expecting me to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you moved around a lot. You went to Royal Bank of Scotland and you did a similar role there.
Speaker 2:One thing I wanted to mention about my 10 years at Bonny Mellon, which is, in many ways, my whole career in 10 years, if you will, from start to finish, because of how I started with a small team and grew it to a larger team, how I started as head of audit for the UK, became head of audit for Europe and then global head of audit for all of asset management, with $1 trillion of assets under management, with 18 companies that I was auditing, from San Francisco to Japan to Australia.
Speaker 1:Brazil, brazil, indeed, yeah, I remember.
Speaker 2:Indeed, one thing I became really good at in those 10 years was mentoring good people in my team by recognizing good talent and developing them. Now Mellon Bank, as it was before it became Boney Mellon, was never the best payer, still isn't. Boney Mellon was never the best pair, still isn't. Boney Mellon isn't in comparison with Goldman Sachs, ubs, etc. But one thing it was good at was the culture was excellent in terms of being supportive, all the things you now hear about looking after your employees, etc. Because of the background of Mellon Bank being in Pittsburgh, which is very much a Christian background, where they stayed very close to their core values and so on, and their core values were teamwork, integrity, excellence.
Speaker 1:And loyalty yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's how you were trained, and they used to reward you for those skill sets by an award called Mellon Star, which is given to like 1% of the employees or less every year, and I managed to win that within the first two years of joining Mellon Bank, and then two people in my team did did. Now, the reason why I mention the mentoring element is because what I found was I took people from different parts of the world who came to London as part of my team. I had Irish people, south Africans, greeks you name it all over the world and I was able to recognize them for what they were in terms of their talent. I had a few Muslims as well who worked for me. I would love to say that my top performers were the Muslims Maybe controversial, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's controversial.
Speaker 2:If that's how it was, and I've thought long and hard about that, and that's something that we can all learn from when you're working for a fellow Muslim, we shouldn't feel that they owe it to you to treat you any differently or to give you preferential treatment. It's the opposite. So I felt in many ways that if I had a Muslim working for me, they sort of expected me to treat them differently and, going back to the way I was brought up with my father and so on, I wasn't going to do that, and that had the opposite impact where I was even more aware of them, you were harsher on them. Perhaps so because I wanted to make sure that I don't come across as yeah, there's no favoritism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, indeed.
Speaker 1:Indeed, that's so interesting and I think it has a lot of carryovers to what we're doing at Kestrel now, bringing in a lot of young talent and mentoring them, mentoring them up Many of them were graduates or interns who are now heads of departments.
Speaker 2:Absolutely what I learned was that you could train someone more in six months through mentoring than what they would learn in two years elsewhere through direct interactions and focus on developing them, looking after them and caring for their welfare.
Speaker 1:So I want to move this on to two aspects. One is quite more selfish and it's to do with me and my brothers, I guess, and one is to do with Islamic finance. But when you became a father and I think about this now and alhamdulillah, I've got children of my own now Did you have an idea for what you wanted your children to do in any way, whether it was career or beyond career, or were you just going with the flow of it?
Speaker 2:I'll be honest with you. As you are aware, all of you were fortunate enough to benefit from private education and, although it's a lot more expensive now with the VAT and so on, even in those days it was very expensive for someone who had a senior job, but it was still a salaried job to pay for two and then three school fees at the same time. The reason why I mention that is because this goes back to my upbringing, where my parents sacrificed for me, so I felt I had to sacrifice my future as in my pension, for example, or savings for my retirement and then spend that money on school fees. Why is that relevant? I felt that by investing in your future, I wanted all of you to have a safe job. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2:I was brought up the way I was where to have a safe job. What do you mean by that? I was brought up the way I was where to have a safe job, you had to have a career where you work for a blue chip organization. You work your way up, so your job is secure. You can move around two or three times, but you knew the path you were taking. So, within the Big Four, for example, starting off as a graduate trainee and working your way up to a manager, senior manager, director, potentially a partner. If you don't become a partner, you move out and get a role in the industry, and so on. So that's what I had in mind for all of you. That's the way the world was.
Speaker 1:That's the way the world was and in many ways, I expected that, in return for investing in your school fees, that you would then pay back by having a secure job that I wouldn't have to worry about your future so how did you feel when I'll use my example rather than than my brothers, because they've they've told their stories when I because I remember I wasn't very happy doing what I was doing I went to Deloitte, which is a big four firm, pretty much because it was what was expected of me. It's similar track to what you did. I went to a graduate scheme, turned out it wasn't in audit, it was in consulting, and I found that out on the final interview day and I think you were quite disappointed by that because I wasn't going to be doing a chartered accountancy qualification. I wasn't going to be doing a chartered accountancy qualification but I did my time at Deloitte.
Speaker 1:I went to a smaller firm called Alpha, a small consultancy, but then I wasn't feeling okay with that for a number of reasons. One was the work and the culture didn't really suit me. Secondly, I was helping big banks to create products which were based in Riba, which was directly conflicting with my religious beliefs, and the culture wasn't incredibly suited to that either. So I remember I only told one person what I was doing and that was papa, my grandfather, and that was I went to apply for an mba because that was just what I was told people do. Someone who I worked with said well, you should think about doing that if you want to figure out a new career. And I think I only told you once I got called for the final interview or in fact, I think when I got the offer.
Speaker 2:So, as a father, I'll tell you, perhaps for the first time in your life, that when you called me from your interview to tell me that you were not being interviewed for a chartered accountancy role, I was shocked in a bad way in a bad way, because to me, the whole point of you going for the interview was because you could follow in my footsteps and become a chartered accountant and I won't have to worry about your future like I didn't in my yeah, career yeah I had to decide then what to do and I thought you've come this far, you have to do it, just do it, and then we'll worry about perhaps you can try and move teams, etc.
Speaker 2:Etc.
Speaker 1:Obviously that didn't happen for reasons they did offer to do the accounting.
Speaker 2:I also realized quite early on that you weren't you weren't an accountant. You're never going to be an accountant, even if you had the opportunity that wasn't in your nature. So then, to me, doing an MBA was like a good substitute for that, in terms of having a professional qualification, which would more than overcome not being a chartered accountant.
Speaker 1:But how did you feel when after that, I said look, I want to do a startup, which is the direct antithesis of what it seemed you'd sacrificed everything for.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I was shocked, I wouldn't say disappointed. I was shocked and I was convinced that I was going to get you to change your mind. But, knowing you quite well, by then I realized that I couldn't just tell you not to do it. So I thought, okay, I'll be clever and just ask you to take your time.
Speaker 2:so don't give up your job at the big four yeah, I was working at pwc at the time indeed and I thought, okay, if you start that job was doing this, which I honestly thought at that stage was just your mba project, which it was an mba project you'd get out of your system after a while and so on, and never in a million years did I think it would succeed, because I couldn't relate to a startup. But what?
Speaker 1:convinced you to then join as a co-founder, because I remember the day you joined. I don't know if you remember.
Speaker 1:But, it was myself and Dying, my good friend and co-founder who I met on the MBA at Cambridge, and we had met someone after Jumbo one day in the city who said, oh, I run a VC firm. Come into the office and pitch to me and maybe we can fund you. And we were like, yeah, this is incredible, let's do it. And we pulled together our deck and we had a very quick demo and we went to this office and we were kind of ambushed. I remember I asked you to come along as well.
Speaker 2:You did ask me to come along, so at that stage I was only there because you asked me to come along.
Speaker 1:Yeah because I think we had this idea that, oh, if you're in the room, then it will give some more gravitas to what we're pitching yeah and we kind of got ambushed because this individual had brought along someone else, one of his other portfolio companies, who was trying to do something similar and they were sort of trying to uh, brain drain us like pull in all of these ideas. But also they got quite rude as well yeah and frankly, uh, you're being diplomatic.
Speaker 1:They didn't pay you any respect yeah, I got very angry, I'll be honest I got very angry in the room and I lost my cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I just remember because, because they treated you like what do you know? You have no experience, which, to be fair, I didn't. I didn't have any experience.
Speaker 1:But I think the way that it, I think what hurt the most was that they were Muslims and they were, I think, like of Pakistani origin.
Speaker 2:I think that's much more cultural, if I may say so. They happened to be Muslims. I think that's much more cultural, if I may say so. Yeah, they happen to be Muslim. But people of that generation perhaps my generation, unfortunately are minded to think like that, because the culture in Pakistan, unfortunately, is still very hierarchical in the sense that age equates respect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's what was happening and I remember coming out of that building and that room furious and sitting down in the Institute of Chartered Accountants, which is where we were working from at the time, and I think I was so angry that, to calm me down, you guys just bought me a cake like a really big slice of chocolate cake that we sat down and ate, and I think it was.
Speaker 1:then you suggested I can't remember who it was but you said look, why don't I come on as CFO, and we'll be three partners meintech and so on and saying, okay, there may be some merit behind this.
Speaker 2:But one thing I realized I remember, having worked at FCA which obviously I didn't get a chance to go into, but I had worked for the regulator when it was first set up and so on I realized that for you to have any chance of success you needed a lot more expertise little experience than you had about the regulatory background, the licenses, the boring stuff, the audit control stuff and so on and, frankly, not the money to pay for anyone to do it. So I thought, okay, if I can help you in my spare time doing that, why not? Number one? Number two I was concerned about protecting my investment in the new school fees. I thought honestly I've said that to a number of my friends that the main reason why I joined Kestrel was to protect my investment in new school fees.
Speaker 2:Okay, because I couldn't afford for Kestrel to fail after investing what I had done.
Speaker 1:Well, they say that a lot of companies love to hire failed founders, so I don't think you would have to worry about that. I would rather not have to learn that lesson.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have to learn that.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting. And when you joined, everything started to change at Kerstral, because people started to take us seriously. We had to step up our game so much because we were very young and naive and we just had this idea that, oh, we're going to build a monzo for muslims and it will be very easy. What we were called to begin with what a tp, yeah, a tp, yeah that's what the name was that we tested it with users, and people said it sounded like dog food.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's that's what we were called, and people started to take us seriously, though, after you joined, and that's when we got our first round of investment, where angel investors to this day, people like Sultan Chowdhury and Stella Cox they said look, we like the idea, but what differentiated you from all the other people loads of people in the market at that time is that you had serious experience behind you.
Speaker 2:Techstars said the same.
Speaker 1:I believe in the interview yeah so we went through the Techstars Accelerator program, which is I won't say it's the same as YC Y Combinator, but it is like an accelerator here in the UK.
Speaker 1:But it kind of counted against us as well because, if you remember, at that time they said that of all the startup co-founding teams, the ones with the highest risk of failure are father-sons, because there's always a dynamic where no one really knows who's in control, particularly when the son is the ceo but that I believe now thinking about it is based more upon the typical startups where the father sets up the company and hands over to the son.
Speaker 2:yeah, maybe there may be a disagreement in terms of the future Right okay, like a Logan Roy succession type situation Exactly or the billionaires in India, and so on.
Speaker 1:Wait, okay, it has been difficult.
Speaker 2:You would say that, like there's been many times where you and I have disagreed, in board meetings and executive meetings, each day and everyone else has sat there just quietly watching and not really knowing what to say Remember what I said about Muslim team members and how I related to them in Boney Mellon, et cetera. Yeah. In the team management meetings that we have had. I feel the same way that just because you're my son, I shouldn't deal you any differently from anyone else.
Speaker 1:But do you admit you kind of go harsher on me because of that.
Speaker 2:Perhaps so, but what I believe I'm doing is wearing my role as a cfo to always make sure that, no matter what else, your job is to look after strategy in the future of the company. My job is to make sure the company survives yeah, and unfortunately, those are the two sides of the same coin.
Speaker 1:You can't you can't do one without the other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it often means we do butt heads, we do uh, but we then get an agreement on the way forward, as well, yeah, alhamdulillah.
Speaker 1:No, it's been very good and I've really appreciated being being able to work with you on this thing, because it's a weird thing to work with a parent, because you never really understand what your parents has gone through, and it's part of the reason why we're doing this podcast today, to be honest, just selfishly, just for me to get to know you better yeah, I appreciate the thanks as well the last thing I wanted to ask you on was your idea on islamic finance, because you've lived through it.
Speaker 1:You were, you arrived in this country when there was no such thing as islamic finance in the west. You saw it rise up. You saw islamic bank of britain. Then it became al rayyan. You saw gatehouse. You saw fintechs come and go. Honestly, as someone who's working in this space, yeah, how do you really feel about this industry?
Speaker 2:so again, as I mentioned to you, my journey towards islam has been very different from yours, because I was born a Muslim, as you were, but in a Muslim country.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I took it for granted, didn't think about the religion as it was less a core part of your identity, as it was exactly.
Speaker 2:Alhamdulillah, I've never earned a penny of interest that I've used. If there has been any interest, I've never given it away and so on. But unfortunately I've had to use nonic mortgages because it wasn't available.
Speaker 1:There was nothing at the time. There was nothing else.
Speaker 2:So since Islamic Bank has come in, personally I've benefited a lot from being able to earn halal income through that and so on, and because of that I've followed the evolution of Islamic Bank of Britain from the outset. I've been one of their account holders from the start and so on. Routeset I've been one of their account holders from the start and so on, and I'm sorry to say that in many ways I feel that the industry in the large sense of large Islamic banks seems to have taken a step back, as we all know that Islamic Bank of Britain or Al Rayyan has cut down. I don't know if they have any branches left at all.
Speaker 1:I think, maybe one or two, maybe, if that.
Speaker 2:So I remember when it first opened they were in the news. I remember seeing the branches in Whitechapel near the Masjid and so on. How exciting it was to have an Islamic bank, to walk in, to be greeted by people and took mama there and she opened an account there as well, etc. Even open an account in your names, I remember.
Speaker 1:I don't think I ever used mine, but at least certainly did a long time, yeah, until it just became untenable because the card never worked, it never worked.
Speaker 2:So there's sadness in the sense that the industry, for me, hasn't evolved the same way as it should have done.
Speaker 2:Now, I personally wouldn't equate Islamic banking, in terms of Islamic Bank of Britain, et cetera, with the fintechs that came later, because I don't think it's apples and apples.
Speaker 2:Sure, yes, can it become that perhaps, and so on, we can evolve towards that. But I was hoping that, like 20 years after or more since Islamic Bank of Britain first came to fruition, we should have a number of Islamic banks, retail banks, if you will, on the high street. Yes, they may not have many branches, like most other banks don't, but they would evolve in a similar manner where we could all feel comfortable having an Islamic debit card, islamic bank account, islamic mortgage, etc. So that, to me, has been a personal disappointment, and the reason why I'm very hopeful for firms like Kestrel and others is because we can evolve towards a model where, perhaps not in the same way of a traditional bank with branches and so on, but together as an industry, we can evolve where we can provide the same sort of facilities to the muslim community in terms of savings, investments, indeed mortgages yeah, for sure, and we're starting to see those bits and pieces we are, but for reasons that we we have discussed in other podcasts and so on.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, there's still the muslim premium we talk about. Yeah. Where you know to be a Muslim. To have an Islamic mortgage, as we found with Ali, and so on, you have to pay almost double each month, which not everyone can afford to. Frankly, the vast majority of Muslims cannot.
Speaker 1:They cannot and what's the alternative?
Speaker 2:to rent, which is even more expensive it's more expensive, yeah, so to me. There's sadness in the sense that we haven't evolved, but I'm still optimistic that, inshallah, we'll get there in my lifetime.
Speaker 1:What do you think we need to be doing? Inshallah, inshallah. I mean what? Do you think we need to be doing at Kestrel?
Speaker 2:Well before I talk about Kestrel, if I can talk about our competitors and fellow members of the Islamic industry, I find that there's still a lot of disunity amongst us. I won't take any names. Right from the outset, I felt that there were so few Islamic fintechs to begin with. Many of them don't exist anymore and, frankly, just as well for some of us that they don't. But those that exist, we don't always work together in the sense we should do, sometimes openly or sometimes behind the scenes. I don't know the reason for that, because if you look at other communities like the Jewish community or the Hindu community, or even Gujaratis in general, if you will, and so on, the Mermans the Mermans, for example, they basically support each other, not because they're related to each other or anything, just because they have this community feeling.
Speaker 1:They look after you right. They look after you right, they look after you.
Speaker 2:I mean, I find that we may seem to be saying the right things when we are in public and so on, but in reality we don't always work in the same way together.
Speaker 1:I have to counter that a little bit. I'm seeing the change. Of course there are disagreements, sometimes public, sometimes private, but alhamdulillah some of my closest friends are people I've met in this industry and I hope and pray that they are who you believe they are.
Speaker 2:Reeve, yeah, but if I may say so, you're a lot more trusting than I am. That's in the nature of the way I've been brought up. I would question someone until they've proven themselves and, frankly, some of the people I respect most in my life are not necessarily Muslims. Yeah, my ex-boss in Mellon you have met. He's always been my role model in terms of the way he mentored me and his ethical background Peter Tom Tom.
Speaker 1:Tom based in.
Speaker 2:Boston yeah. Yeah, really good guy Really good guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, wow, before we get to the advice, I guess, what do you think Kestrel should be doing?
Speaker 2:I have a lot of dreams for Kestrel Number one, if I may say so. Well done for us surviving five years after we were sent off to London Because to me that indeed is success in its own right.
Speaker 1:That's not on us, that's completely through. Qadar of Allah, yeah, qadar of Allah.
Speaker 2:Number two we need to keep on evolving the way we are, but the only advice I would give you is what I give you in all the team meetings, management committees and so on is have the dreams that you have, because that's what I love about you, that you. You have a dream for what you want kestrel to be, for the ummah, not for your personal benefit, but something that can benefit, be the greater good for the Ummah in general, for the British Muslims, muslims in general, and so on. But just be realistic in terms of the challenges we face, so that we need to get there, yeah, we need to make it. We need to survive, to make it, to survive, to make it, yeah, and to survive. We may need to do some boring things, in islamic banking, for example, which you may not find, frankly, exciting or interesting, which you don't but but unfortunately you have to do it, just to make sure that you achieve the greater good and alhamdulillah, we've learned a lot and we've matured and we've all changed in doing these things as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and people respect us for that and so on, but we need to keep on doing that as an investment in what your goal is, which is to achieve the true Islamic fintech which people can use as the monzo for Muslims, as you once described us, I think that's a very good place to end it.
Speaker 1:Okay, dada, thank you so much for your time. As-salamu alaykum.
Speaker 2:Walaykum as-salam, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Muslim Money Talk podcast. If you like what you heard, then please subscribe to Muslim Money Talk. Wherever you might have been listening to this, give us a like and share it with someone who you think might be interested. It really, really helps us out. Thank you, as-salamu alaykum, and see you next time.