Faizal Karim

Faizal Karim builds the systems that move money.

VP of Engineering and Product at VoPay. Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, UBC.

For thirteen years I’ve built and led engineering and product teams in financial technology. Today I run product and engineering at VoPay, a FinTech-as-a-Service payments platform operating across Canada, the US and the Middle East.

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Portrait of Faizal Karim in a light blue sweater and navy tie, arms crossed, outdoors in downtown Vancouver

A quantum-dot cellular automata wire

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This is a quantum-dot cellular automata wire. Each cell holds two electrons, and each copies the arrangement of its neighbour, so a bit travels down the line without any current flowing. My doctoral research was about making circuits like this reliable. My work now is about making payments just as dependable.

What I do now

At VoPay I own the product vision, roadmap and delivery for a platform that started as a Canadian payments provider and now runs on every major Canadian rail, US payments, cross-border transfers, payment links, KYB and identity verification, and real-time fraud monitoring.

I’m leading our expansion into Qatar and the wider MENA region, building a team in Doha across product, engineering and support. I’ve also made our engineering and support work AI-first, with agents that write tickets and code, review and test pull requests, and draft support replies.

I still write code. Most of it is Python, Go and AWS infrastructure.

Results

  • 1,300%+Revenue growth at VoPay since 2021, as the platform grew from one country to a multi-rail, multi-country business.
  • 3,000%Revenue growth over five years for a digital onboarding product I oversaw at Broadridge.
  • 60+ peopleThe development organization I led across Canada and India at Broadridge, where I was promoted five times in eight years.
  • $5M budgetDevelopment budget I managed, alongside a $600K infrastructure budget and a department P&L.

Deals I’ve helped win and deliver

Computershare, Duck Creek, Mastercard and Global Payments at VoPay. National Bank, iA Financial Group, Desjardins, The Hartford, Goldman Sachs and Maybank Kim Eng at Broadridge.

Keep reading

Curriculum vitae

Roles, responsibilities and results at VoPay, Broadridge and UBC, with education and awards.

Research

Nanoelectronics research on quantum-dot cellular automata, with papers to read and download.

Teaching

Seven UBC courses as a sessional instructor, teaching assistant training, and undergraduate research supervision.