Saadi Azeem

Saadi is at the forefront of McKinsey’s work in banking and advanced analytics. He develops and leads substantial transformation projects for banks, financial institutions, and public-finance entities in Middle Eastern countries, bringing a wealth of experience and knowledge in key strategic areas including performance-based transformations.

Saadi’s recent client engagements include the following:

• helping lead the build and scale-up of an advanced analytics Center of Excellence for a large bank in Dubai. This included launching use cases across corporate, SME, retail, wealth management and risk domains, and the hiring of 100+ personnel in data science, engineering, machine learning, product owner and translator roles. The project led to $100+ million in financial impact
• guiding a program to address a key Middle Eastern country’s funding gap through mobilization of critical levers. This included the development of corporate-debt capital markets, setting up a dedicated credit guarantee, public and private sector investment funds, and attracting foreign financial institutions in the country
• assisting one of the largest M&A transactions in KSA, involving the merger of two banks to create a national champion with $200+ billion assets and 7+ million customers
• enabling a large bank in a Gulf Cooperation Council country (GCC) to grow revenue and profits substantially through performance transformation of critical business units, including wholesale banking, global markets, and business banking
• supporting a prominent capital markets institution in GCC to grow its wealth management business substantially and increase assets under management (AUMs) by penetrating alternative asset classes
• helping lead a 2-year transformation for a prominent bank including corporate banking, fee optimization, and cost efficiency. The program resulted in more than $500 million in net profit impact.

Before joining McKinsey, Saadi gained five years of experience across retail, risk, and corporate banking at Standard Chartered Pakistan. He has been the keynote speaker at multiple analytics and artificial intelligence forums locally and internationally.