Asim Khan

Asim Khan is a Fellow Chartered Accountant with more than 25 years experience in financial services in Middle East and Europe. Asim is the Chief Executive Officer of Khalij Group, a partner firm of Fortis Auxilium, which is an award winning FCA regulated investment and advisory boutique headquartered in the United Kingdom with presence in United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Pakistan.

Asim specialises in providing strategic financial advice, Investment advisory and structured solutions to clients, which includes financial institutions, asset managers and family offices based in Europe, Middle East and Far East. Asim has experience in working across all product types and asset classes, and under his leadership, Khalij has developed assets under advisory in excess of USD 1 billion. Asim also advises his clients in raising funds and distributing financial instruments and has helped his clients raise in excess of USD 500 million over the last 3 years.

Asim is a regular speaker on investments, finance and fintech conferences and seminars and have also appeared on television in the United Kingdom and Europe. Asim also holds an honorary doctorate in comparative religion.

Steve Cochrane

CISSP and CCSP Security consultant with extensive experience leading the implemention and management of large scale and complex security programmes. Areas include Security Architecture, Audit and Assurance, Data Security, Cyber Resilience, Risk assessment and management, IT transformation, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Cloud.

Cross-sector experience of regulated environments covering Finance, Health, Central Government and Telecoms. Implementation of frameworks such as ISO27001, PCI-DSS and NIST.

Jonathan Mortell

Jonathan is Partner, Business Consulting at Fortis Auxilium and brings extensive experience of the Middle Eastern market in corporate lending, credit risk management, strategic planning and change management. He has over 30 years' experience of working in global banks in the fields of corporate lending and strategic planning and has successfuly led customer facing relationship management teams to deliver challenging sales and profit targets.

Jonathan has previously held positions as Head of Lloyds TSB Corporate Banking for the Middle East based in Dubai, UAE and was SVP, Head of Corporate Customer Strategy & Tactics at Riyad Bank in Saudi Arabia where he led a cultural change project which shifted the focus of the bank's 120+ relationship managers away from a sales-volume culture to a Return on Asset value added proposition for the bank's $26bn corporate loan book.

Jonathan is an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Financial Services and is a Certified Islamic Finance Executive.

He has unique insight into negotiating and structuring conventional and Islamic finance transactions for the benefit of clients and has access to Middle Eastern banks with appetites for both medium and long-term project funding.

Ahmet Pearl

Ahmet is the model risk subject matter expert for Fortis Auxilium. Ahmet has over 15 years of industry experience in model risk and model development. Know more...

After completing his bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Ahmet completed a master's degree in Mathematics and immediately complemented this with a further master's degree in Banking and Finance.

After completing his studies, Ahmet worked in risk control roles for several financial institutions, including global banks such as UBS. Using various computer programs, machine learning and artificial intelligence, he helped to develop and apply various tools to monitor the financial markets. Ahmet has overseen the implementation of financial products within the given framework of IT, compliance, regulation, liaising with technical experts as required. Ahmet has extensive experience of portfolio and data analytics and can is adept at integrating machine learning to solve tasks quickly and efficiently. Ahmet has significant experience of: C/C++, Matlab/Simulink, Access / Excel, VBA, SQL, JAVA, Alteryx, R and Python.

Ahmet has also developed and implemented a data analysis tools which uses artificial intelligence to risk monitor the financial sector, and has also been involved in the research and development of solutions for online banking, using various tools including encryption mechanisms.

Ahmet has significant experience of model risk in all defense lines (first line, second line and third line). Model risk is the risk associated to model error or incorrect model use. Model error can arise from:

1. inadequate model development and implementation processes;
2. incorrect model use;
3. inadequate model validation and review; and
4. poor model governance.

Ahmet has developed, operated, validated, and reviewed the following types of models:

•  Market risk control measures - VaR, Stress testing and sensitivities;
•  Liquidity risk measures;
•  Credit risk measures such as Credit VaR, credit spreads derived from credit instruments, Rating/scoring and LGD measures;
•  Capital adequacy measures such as Economic Capital, Stress testing scenarios;
•  IFRS 32/39, 9 valuation models; and
•  Balance sheet, accounting models and PPNR estimates.

Dr. Tariq Sattar

Dr. Tariq (BSc (Bio), BSc (EEE), PhD, MIET, FBINDT) is a pioneer in the field of “Robotic Non-Destructive Testing (NDT)”. His research has developed robots for the in-situ non-destructive inspection of pressure vessels, petrochemical storage tanks, wind turbine blades, off-shore flexible oil and gas risers, and mooring chains. Recent robotics projects have developed a handling system to pack soft fruit, carry out welding repairs in pipelines, and perform automated assembly of thermoplastic composite aircraft fuselage.

He is a research professor who has recently completed seven years of tenure as TWI Chair and Director of the Innovation Centre for the Automation of Non-destructive testing.

The research teams that he has led have been awarded eighteen innovation or best paper awards in the field of industrial robots. This work has been selected by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering for their science and engineering exhibitions and to promote STEM subjects to young people.

He has delivered sixteen plenary and keynote lectures at international conferences and corporate power outages conferences.

Tariq has more than thirty years of experience as an academic, teaching control engineering, performing senior manager roles and managing pedagogy projects. He has held the post of head of the department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at London South Bank University for three years.

He heads Robotic NDT Ltd, a partner firm of Fortis Auxilium providing scientific and technical consultancy.

Dr. Matloob Khushi

Dr. Khushi is an Advisor to Fortis Auxilium in the application of artificial intelligence, big data and financial/ risk modelling. Dr. Khushi has over 20 years of industry and academic experience. He is presently the Course Leader of M.Sc. AI and Data Science and the Senior Lecturer at the University of Suffolk, UK.

He has been serving The University of Sydney, Australia since 2008 at various positions including the most recent senior position (2017-2021) as the Director from the Master of Data Science programme, where he delivered the most successful Australian AI/Data Science programme. He earned his PhD in AI and Data Science from the University of Sydney in which he developed novel algorithms for solving big genomic data and health informatics.

Dr. Khushi has earned various awards for his research achievements and has authored more than 50 research papers, his ResearchGate score is 23.33 which is higher than 77.5% of the researchers world-wide. During his postdoc (2014-2017) at the Children's Medical Research Institute, Australia he developed automated AI-based algorithms for developing cancer drugs expediting the discovery process. Some of his research publications caught international and Australian media attention. He has also developed solutions for the financial industry for the prediction of stock, forex and commodities markets.

Dr. Khushi has supervised more than 100 research theses in various domains of AI, big data and data science.

Dr. Shoaib ud Din

Dr. Shoaib ud Din is an advisor to Fortis Auxilium, advising on the development and establishment of training programs relating to the application of mathematics and statistics in computer science, banking, finance, and medical sciences.

Dr. Shoaib spent over 35 years in academia where he taught and supervised Mathematics and Statistics at graduate and postgraduate levels. He has published several papers in the fields of Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, particularly in relation to Combinational Theory (Block designs, Graph Theory, Error Correcting codes) and Investigation of Generalised Hadamard Matrices and associated designs using Graph Theoretic techniques, design and codes. Dr. Shoaib is passionate about sharing his knowledge and has developed mathematical and statistical curriculums at Punjab University for both graduate and postgraduate programs. He also developed a mathematics course for Pakistan Online Virtual University as well as courses relating to the application of mathematics in computer science.

Dr. Shoaib was Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Punjab University Pakistan, Visiting Professor at University of Wales and spent a sabbatical year at FAST (Foundation for Advancement of Science and Technology), a premier university of computer and emerging sciences in Pakistan, where he developed and delivered mathematics courses with application in computer science. He was the founding principle of Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT).

Dr. Shoaib holds a Masters and PhD in Mathematics from the University of Wales.

M. A. Mian

Mr. Mian is a registered professional engineer (PE) in the State of Colorado, is a principal consultant at O&G Knowledge Sharing Platform. Mian has 40 years of diversified international experience in reservoir engineering, project economics and strategic planning.

He has a B.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering, an M.Sc. degree in petroleum engineering and an M.Sc. degree in mineral economics. Both the masters are from the Colorado School of Mines.

Mian is the author of six books: Petroleum Engineering Handbook for the Practicing Engineers, Vol. 1 and 2, Project Economics and Decision Analysis, Vol. 1 and 2 and Tips & Tricks for Excel Based Financial Modeling, Vol. 1 and 2. The books on project economics and decision analysis are currently used as textbooks to teach project economics to graduate and undergraduate students in many universities worldwide. He has also published many technical papers and presented papers at SPE conferences.

Mian has also delivered 5-day courses on reservoir engineering, project economics and decision analysis and advanced project economics and decision analysis in 25 countries. Mian also received the 2021 SPE International Management Award, recognizing his outstanding contributions to the oil & gas industry.

Mohammed Azad

Mohammed Azad leads the Fortis Auxilium tax practice in the UK and is responsible for developing and implementing personal and corporate tax solutions for clients.

Mohammed has over 20 years' experience working in the big 4 accountancy and consulting firms and within large multi-national companies. Before joining Fortis Auxilium, Mohammed held leadership roles in large multinational companies overseeing and managing overseas tax risks and compliance obligations with operations in the EMEA region. He is well versed at explaining complex tax legislations and their implications to senior company executives.

Mohammed's experience includes:

•  tax integration software implementation for finance teams located in Europe, Africa, Middle East and the Americas;
•  advising executive management on tax implications (including permanent establishment risk) of establishing subsidiaries & branches in overseas jurisdictions;
•  examining and evaluating new tax structures;
•  advising business management on the tax implications of acquisitions and divestments;
•  managing internal tax policies, systems and documentation, so that they continue to reflect the latest tax laws, accounting standards and practices; and
•  supporting multinationals in dealing with tax authorities during audits and investigations relating to Corporation Tax, VAT or PAYE.

Mohammed Azad is a qualified Charted Tax Advisor and holds an LLB in Business & Finance Law (from Brunel University).