Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—Saudi-based fintech savings app Hakbah announced that Dimitar Kazakov has joined Chief Technology Officer and a co-founder and Marcin Szynal has joined as vice president of Engineering to level up the technical team and take Hakbah to the next step on its ambitious journey to be one of the top three companies in savings industry in the Middle East.
Hakbah Fintech is on a mission to encourage people to save and to promote better financial health. Hakbah’s core savings feature uses savings groups as an economic anchor to help people acquire better saving habits and gain access to funds via their savings.
Kazakov will lead the tech and engineering teams to build and deliver new features and expand the app’s savings offerings. He brings over 17 years of leadership expertise working with start-ups and scale-ups in fintech and e-commerce. He has held pivotal roles at Microsoft, Cardeo Ltd, Swogo, and other companies in Europe.
“I’m excited to join Hakbah and utilize my experience with such a groundbreaking early-stage business and have the opportunity to play a significant role in its growth from the inception stage. I’m looking forward to starting the next chapter to digitalize traditional savings and elevate it to help people benefit their savings,” Kazakov said.
Szynal, as VP of engineering, will report directly to Kazakov to meet the challenge of building great new features for our growing user base while focusing on world-class standards of quality and reliability. Szynal has over ten years of experience in software development in Europe and GCC, including RTA Dubai, Landmark Group, Netflix, Adidas, Lavazza, and Nordic API.
Szynal said: “I’m immediately impressed both by Hakbah’s vision and mission, and its impact on people. Hakbah has a great future ahead as it enables its customers to continue to build savings, and I’m thrilled to be a part of that journey.”
Hakbah offers its solution under a Fintech Sandbox permit from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) and graduated from DIFC Fintech Accelerator Programme 2019. Hakbah successfully raised USD 1.2 million in seed rounds in Jan. 2021. Despite the pandemic, the company has continued hiring and strengthening its leadership team; it grew 4x just in Q4 2021 with recorded a 200% increase in total customer savings.
