About Saad Salman

Last updated August 20, 2026

I'm Saad Salman, a Lahore-based fintech product manager specialising in card issuing, digital payments and multi-currency banking at Keep Technologies.

My path into fintech started on the engineering side: years of L2/L3 support and client implementations at a card processor, before I moved into program consulting and then into program management. That order still shows. I think about product decisions the way an engineer thinks about a processor integration: what breaks, what a card network actually allows, what a sponsor bank will and won't sign off on, rather than starting from a roadmap slide and working backward.

How I got here

I started at i2c, a card processor, in February 2019, on the engineering side: L2 and L3 support and client implementations. Two launches from that period still shape how I work. Crypto.com's prepaid card in the EU and Canada, which meant bridging a digital-asset business to card rails in a way the network and compliance could both accept. And a migration of six million gift cards from Kiwibank's Prezzy Card to epay after its acquisition, without dropping partners or transactions. Processor work teaches you the physics of cards: what a network allows, what a message actually contains and where things break.

In 2021 I moved to HypeFin as a program consultant and spent a year owning partner and processor integrations across roughly ten startup and scale-up card programs in the UK, the EU and MENAP: London-based Pomelo Pay's Mastercard corporate card, Pozitive Payments' acquiring and issuing programme, SimpliFi's cards-as-a-service rollout across the Middle East and Pakistan and the co-branded prepaid cards RepX launched for Wolverhampton and AS Roma.

What I do at Keep

Since May 2022 I've led program management at Keep Technologies in Toronto. I launched Keep's card program end to end with Mastercard as the network, PTC as the sponsor bank and i2c as the processor, then shipped digital wallets and physical cards printed by G&D. After that came 3DS, ABU and NVS, new card policies and network compliance, Keep Travel (members spend rewards on trips booked through Duffel, with more than $1M booked through it), expense management built on Rutter and the automatic QuickBooks Online bank feeds that followed. The program has scaled to around $750M in gross TPV, roughly 20K physical cards shipped and 8K active digital wallets. I lead a team of five and the program is growing toward $26M ARR. Figures as of September 2026.

At Keep Technologies, I own the card program end to end: the relationships with the network, processor and sponsor bank; the roadmap across cards, wallets and expense management; and a team of five shipping against it. The specifics (what launched, when, with what result) are on the Experience page. What doesn't fit neatly into a timeline is the pattern underneath it. Card programs live or die on the boring parts: compliance, vendor coordination, the sponsor-bank relationship. That is where most of my actual time goes.

Four regulatory regimes, one job

That regulatory range is the part that doesn't show up on a resume bullet. A sponsor-bank program in Canada, FCA-regulated card issuing in the UK and a cards-as-a-service rollout across the Middle East and Pakistan each come with their own compliance shape, their own sign-off chain and their own idea of what "launched" means. A UK sponsor bank's risk review does not look like a Canadian one, and neither looks like the approval chain for a multi-market cards-as-a-service build. None of it transfers directly from the last program, which is most of why the work stays interesting.

How I work

I think in the checklists I learned doing processor integrations. Before a roadmap slide, I want to know the message flows, the network rules that apply, what the sponsor bank will sign off on and which vendor holds the critical path. I write things down: a definition of success before we ship, instrumentation on the handful of events that measure it and a standing habit of looking at them. I run programs the boring way, with weekly vendor calls, a single tracker everyone can see and compliance items first because they are the ones that slip. And I say when something does not apply, which is most of the value of having done it before.

Consulting

I also consult independently on card program strategy, processor and network selection, payments roadmaps and program or vendor management, for teams earlier in that process than Keep was when I joined. Recent engagements have covered processor RFPs, network selection for a new issuing program and prioritising what to build next across issuing and multi-currency banking. They range from a single working session to unblock one decision, to ongoing fractional advisory.

The consulting page lists the services, the process and the engagement types.

Beyond the day job

Outside Keep I build things that scratch my own itch. Gramafin is a personal finance app for Pakistan that I'm building in public. Building it I needed daily NAV data for every Pakistani mutual fund, and MUFAP's own endpoints refused anything that wasn't a browser, so I wrote a scraper and open-sourced it as a free API covering 500+ funds. This site was built through a conversation with Claude Code, and I wrote up how. I write here about payments, fintech in emerging markets and building products, and I'm a member of a Toastmasters club, which is where a lot of the writing starts as a speech.

Background

I'm fascinated by how money moves across borders, currencies and systems, and by making that feel effortless for the people using it. I'm based in Lahore, and I work with teams remotely across Canada, the UK, the EU and the Middle East. I hold an MS in Software Project Management and a BS in Computer Science, both from FAST–NUCES, along with certifications in Scrum Fundamentals, Agile Project Management, product analytics and growth product management. That is the process side of shipping the same programs.

Questions people ask

Name:

Saad Salman

Profession:

Fintech Product Manager

Specialisation:

Cards, Payments & Banking Products

Location:

Lahore, Pakistan

Current company:

Keep Technologies

Education:

FAST–NUCES