Zainab Kalsoom Iqbal is a director and project manager in K2 Integrity’s Financial Crimes Compliance practice. With more than 10 years of experience in the financial services industry and consulting (Big 4), both in the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, Zainab leads and driving transformational change in the financial crime and compliance domain, as well as cyber domain. Zainab leverages her experience and knowledge of financial crime compliance, digital innovation, and cutting-edge technologies to lead and drive change that improves financial crime threat mitigation from a people, process, and technology perspective.
Prior to joining K2 Integrity, Zainab worked as a project manager at Deloitte Middle East in the Risk Advisory – Cyber Cloud and Financial Services portfolio. Zainab managed projects in the cyber domain from a risk advisory perspective for a Kingdom of Saudi Arabia cloud service provider and a large UAE-based bank. She managed a multidisciplinary team while aiding these companies in fulfilling regulatory and compliance obligations in line with international and local cybersecurity rules, regulations, and standards, including ISO/IEC27001, ISO/IEC27017 and ISO/IEC2018. In addition, she managed a project worth over US$1 million for a large bank in the region with a team of business analysts, developers, technical and functional leads, and solution architects, in the domain of identity and access management.
Before her time at Deloitte, Zainab worked in the financial crime compliance function for HSBC Global, both in its London headquarters in London and its Middle East Head Office in the UAE. She supported and delivered financial compliance projects at a global level, notably the operational effectiveness program triggered by the U.S. Department of Justice. Her experience in the bank’s Middle East office includes leading the systems space for the financial crime function, which included strategic definition and design as well as the deployment of technology solutions, ensuring business requirements were fulfilled at a regional and country level. Earlier in her career, Zainab worked for other major banks (Citi UK and Royal Bank of Scotland) in London. She started her career as a junior economist working at the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, conducting statistical analysis, regression modelling, and forecasting, which fed into wider economic papers, briefings, and publications.
Zainab has an M.S. in digital transformation, with a focus on IT and emerging technologies, from Politecnico Di Milano. Zainab also holds an executive certificate in strategy and innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management and is a Prince2 Agile Practitioner. A native English speaker, Zainab is conversational in Italian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi.
