Farah Shaikh has joined fintech company Finastra as a global solutions expert in its European transaction banking business.

Shaikh joins from Crown Agents Bank where she held the role of vice-president of trade finance. During her time at the bank, she built a trade operations team from scratch and helped the business more than double its trade revenues.

Prior to working for Crown Agents Bank, Shaikh held roles at Zenith Bank in London and HSBC in India, in trade finance operations and as a supply chain manager respectively. Shaikh started her career at ABN Amro in India after graduating with a Masters in accounts and financial management from the University of Baroda.

“At Finastra, I am focused on providing the right solutions for our customers across trade finance,” Shaikh tells GTR. “In particular understanding the specific technological and operational needs of our clients, ensuring we know their pain points and can help to drive their digital strategy for efficiency, and to optimise their working capital requirements.”

Shaikh reports to Jonathan Ready, Finastra’s transaction banking pre-sales manager, and will remain London-based.

She says her new role offers an exciting challenge and is different to her previous positions at banks. “I am now on the other side of the table. Throughout my career, and more so in recent years, I am seeing a big shift happening towards the digitisation of trade. At this stage, the move felt right and is aligned with my interests in technology and using it to improve the efficiency of trade finance processes. I am excited to be part of Finastra and the FusionFabric.cloud platform.”

The FusionFabric.cloud platform went live last year and aims to accelerate innovation for Finastra’s bank clients by allowing them to easily connect to fintech applications within an open marketplace. The platform allows fintech companies and other makers of financial applications to build, deploy and operate cloud applications through open APIs to Finastra’s core banking infrastructure.