YOUSSEF AHDY.
PAYMENTS OPERATIONS LEADER.
I spend my days making sure the money behind every transaction lands exactly where it should — and my evenings building tools so I do not have to do it myself.
About Me
I have spent 24 years in cards and payments operations — 22 of them at three banks: Banque Misr, National Bank of Abu Dhabi (now FAB Misr), and ADCB Egypt. Across those institutions, I managed operations under both in-house and outsourced processing models.
For the past two years, I have been with Network International, the largest payment processor in the Middle East and Africa. I currently lead settlement and reconciliation operations supporting 250 clients across 50 countries, including banks, mobile network operators, and fintechs. I also oversee NI's acquiring operations serving 130K+ merchants across Egypt and the UAE.
My expertise spans cards, mobile wallets, instant payments, POS, e-commerce, and ATM operations. I specialize in settlement; transaction and account reconciliation; dispute and chargeback management; ATM cash management; fraud monitoring; and card issuance and maintenance.
Operational risk, governance, and compliance are central to how I lead. I build controlled, resilient, and auditable operations through risk and control self-assessments, business continuity management, regulatory compliance, SLA management, and continuous operational improvement. I always apply automation to reduce manual work, accelerate exception handling, and make operational knowledge easier to access.
Throughout my career, I have led and delivered projects across four principal areas:
Products & Features
Debit, credit, and prepaid cards; physical and virtual cards; single- and multi-currency products; mobile wallets; installment programs (EPP); and Dynamic Currency Conversion for POS and ATM channels.
Platform Implementations & Migrations
Core banking systems, card management systems, reconciliation engines, dispute management portals, CRM platforms, workflow solutions, and ticketing systems.
Payment Schemes & Local Switches
International schemes such as Visa, Mastercard, UPI, JCB, American Express, and Diners Club, plus domestic/local switches such as Meeza, IPN, UAE Switch, GhIPSS, NIBSS, and GIM-UEMOA.
Payment Technologies
EMV, 3-D Secure, cardless ATM transactions, CX Banking, and tokenization.
Experience
24 years, four institutions
Twenty-two years inside banks — issuer and acquirer, in-house and outsourced processing — then to the processor side, serving the banks I used to sit in.
Managing large-scale operations for the biggest processor in the Middle East and Africa. Leading a team of 40 professionals, overseeing settlement and reconciliation for banks, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and FinTechs serving 250 clients in 50 different countries, in addition to overseeing our merchant acquiring operations in both Egypt and the UAE.
Led a 70-person team spanning settlement, reconciliation, and chargeback across millions of debit, credit, and prepaid cards; acquiring for hundreds of thousands of POS and e-commerce merchants and 5,000+ ATMs; roughly 1 million mobile wallets; and thousands of daily IPN transactions across payer, payee, and merchant acceptance. Also covered settlement for FinTechs (Fawry, Opay, Nexta) and MNOs (We, Vodafone) using Banque Misr as their settlement bank.
Twelve years building the function from the ground up — settlement, disputes, ATM cash operations, and reconciliation systems — through platform migrations, a bank rebrand, and multiple new product launches.
Handled disputes and chargebacks as both issuer and ATM acquirer for Visa and Mastercard, and processed daily BASE II files across card management and core banking systems.
Started here — investigating disputes and working retrieval, chargeback, and arbitration cases on VROL and MasterCOM, the systems I'd spend the next two decades building processes around.
Skills
Dispute Resolution
Two decades resolving disputes as both issuer and acquirer — thousands of cases closed under Visa, Mastercard, 123 Network, Meeza, and Ta7weel rules and timeframes.
Settlement & Reconciliation
Built automation tools that lifted the speed and accuracy of settlement work, while keeping every GL account — suspense, P&L, correspondent — reconciled and audit-ready.
ATM Cash Management
Managed CIT companies end to end — inventory, replenishment, cash requests, returned cash, vault custody — with reconciliation to catch and settle every over or short.
Card Issuance & Maintenance
Hands-on across the full card lifecycle — data entry, personalization, and fulfillment — plus maintenance requests, and stock and reorder management with the vendor.
Fraud Management
Trained to monitor, investigate, and report fraud across every major technique, and to tune detection rules against real trends without drowning the team in false positives.
Reporting & MIS
Own reporting to every stakeholder that matters — management MIS, Quarterly Member Reports to the schemes, and regulatory submissions to the Central Bank of Egypt.
Leadership
Two decades leading people — setting objectives, coaching and hiring, recognizing performance, and building succession plans so the team never depends on one person.
What I'm Building Now
Recently I became interested in AI tools — not just as a user, but as someone who wants to understand how modern AI systems work and eventually build practical solutions with them. My focus is on AI fundamentals, prompting and context engineering, AI-assisted/vibe coding, workflow automation, agents, APIs, RAG, and knowledge systems.
These aren't shipped products — they're the problems from my own operation that I'm using to learn applied AI. I'm documenting the process as I go, so consider this section a work in progress by design.
Reconciliation Copilot
An assistant that sits over settlement and GL reconciliation, flags breaks, and explains discrepancies in plain language instead of a raw exception report.
Scheme Cost Intelligence
Turning Visa and Mastercard billing invoices into a structured cost model — trend analysis and optimization opportunities that today live in scattered spreadsheets.
Document Intelligence for Scheme Files
Parsing Mastercard IPM (T112/T140/T464/TN70) and Visa CTF/SMS files — including EBCDIC conversion and unstructured reports — without hand-built, brittle scripts for every format.
Internal Payments Knowledge System
A searchable memory of scheme rules, SOPs, and past dispute outcomes, so answers don't depend on which senior person happens to be in the room.
Outside the Office
Al Ahly is home, Barcelona and Liverpool are the others I follow closely. Messi is the greatest to ever play, no debate — and Mo Salah is the best Egypt has produced.
Amr Diab, for thirty years running. Rarely a day goes by without music somewhere in the background.
Alexandria, Sharm El Sheikh, Ain Sokhna — anywhere with a coastline is where I'd rather be.
I love cars — a big fan of German manufacturers (BMW, Mercedes, and Audi). I've owned Volkswagens since 2009, and I keep up with every new car review landing in the Egyptian market.
PS5, EA Sports FC 26 — with friends when I can, online when I can't.
One brother, a tour guide; one sister, an engineer. Cairo, always home base.
My father was the biggest influence on how I try to lead — wise, endlessly generous with people, and remembered above all for his integrity. That's still the standard I measure myself against. The standard