Halima Iqbal

Chief Executive Officer and Founder

Halima Iqbal is the co-founder and chief executive of Oraan, a Pakistani fintech she founded in 2018 with Farwah Tapal, offering savings, credit and insurance products designed for women in a market that is home to five per cent of the world's unbanked female population. Its core product digitises the informal savings circles known locally as committees, through which an estimated sixty million Pakistani women save and move billions of dollars a year outside the formal financial system. She worked for eight years as an investment banker and consultant and spent a decade in North America before returning to Pakistan in 2017 with the aim of making finance inclusive. Under her leadership Oraan raised $3 million in a seed round co-led by Zayn Capital and Wavemaker Partners, the largest seed round closed by a women-founded and women-led startup in Pakistan.