Lubna is a financial technology professional with experience in DFS research, consulting, product development, business development, and channel partnerships, in-depth research into FinTech propositions. Lubna is the founding director for FinTech Center at Information Technology University where she is responsible for building the Center from ground up, the overall research direction, funding, human resource and project management of the Center. The center is the first partner lab of the Digital Financial Services Research Group at the University of Washington on solutions for DFS adoption and is expected to serve as a blueprint for future labs that will become part of this network. Focus areas of the center include DFS solutions and adoption for low literate and low-income populations in general and women in particular which begin with qualitative explorations and lead to focus segments, needs, solution design and testing. The FinTech Center has projects on women’s financial inclusion especially women entrepreneurs, group savings and fraudulent SMS detection which intersect with the areas of data science, security and human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D).
Lubna is also a consultant with FinSurgents, a Singapore based company working in Pakistan, where she has been the lead author of two studies to date. First study “Seeding Innovation: A Framework for Rooting FinTechs in Pakistan” was an in-depth study of the FinTech ecosystem in Pakistan in comparison with global hubs to suggest a road map for ecosystem development. It also included a framework for Karandaaz Pakistan to invest in FinTech startups. The other study was titled ‘Bridging the Policy Gaps: Enhancing Online Commerce in Pakistan’ which made recommendations regarding consumer protection laws, digital payment systems and human capital development in the online commerce industry. She has also been part of the team informally advising the State Bank of Pakistan on FinTech regulatory initiatives around the globe. She has authored four papers to date for SBP on regulations regarding Digital payments, P2P lending, FinTechs and Regulatory Sandboxes.
Before FinSurgents, Lubna was part of Vopium A/S, a Denmark based technology company. She was the ‘Product Development Lead – Mobile International Remittance platform’ and defined complete business requirements for front end app (End user) and back-end (KYC, payment, settlement, reporting, monitoring, money transfer, fraud prevention modules), led user experience definition and design activity, performed Regulatory research on EU Payments Services Directive, HMRC UK AML/KYC regulations and guidelines resulting in Risk based policy design for KYC, undertook vendor selection, on boarding and management for KYC/AML systems and payment processing (PEP, EU terror list, FATF, ID doc verification systems), supervise development team activities and overall project, reporting progress directly to CEO.
Before joining Vopium, Lubna worked as a marketing consultant for an NGO named Sudhaar which worked towards abolishing child labor and transparency in governance.