Zafar Masud

Zafar Masud is a Pakistani banker, public policy voice, philanthropist and author, with three decades of leadership across development finance, energy and corporate governance. 

He is President & CEO of The Bank of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest priority sector bank, with a US$ 9 billion balance sheet, more than 14,000 employees and a network of 950 branches and the only AAA-rated bank majority-owned by a provincial government. Since taking charge in April 2020, he has more than doubled its deposits, lending and profits. BOP is the country’s largest digital lender and credit card issuer and financier of SMEs, agriculture, low-cost housing and women entrepreneurs categories, in which it became the only bank with both a horizontal and a vertical hat-trick at the Pakistan Banking Awards. Its shares delivered the highest total return of any Asia Pacific bank in 2025 (S&P Global). 

He is also non-executive Chairman of Oil & Gas Development Company (OGDC), Pakistan’s largest listed company (also listed in London), producing around half the country’s oil, with proven and probable reserves of ~800 MMBOE and exploration acreage covering 40% of Pakistan. 

As twice-elected Chairman of the Pakistan Banks Association, he led the PKR 1.225 trillion (US$ 4.4 billion) circular-debt restructuring in 2025, among Pakistan’s largest ever. Under his chairmanship, the PBA held its first-ever elections and brought women onto its Executive Committee. The industry took over the PKR 80 billion-a-year remitter incentive and launched the PKR 16 billion-a-year Pasban Remittance Reward Scheme, cut export refinance rates to 4.5%, and lifted private, agricultural and SME credit to record levels, committing PKR 2 trillion each to agriculture and SMEs by 2028. 

Earlier, he held senior roles at American Express, Citigroup, Dubai Islamic Bank and Barclays, where he was Regional Managing Director for Southern Africa. He sat on the State Bank of Pakistan’s Board and Monetary Policy Committee from 2013; as Director General of National Savings (2016-18) led its first digital overhaul and new schemes for people with disabilities, martyrs’ families, and overseas Pakistanis; and was founding CEO of InfraZamin Pakistan, Pakistan’s first credit-enhancement company. 

He sits on the boards of Pakistan Airports Authority and RAAST Payments, serves on the Prime Minister’s Committees on Homegrown Economic Transformation, Access to Finance, and Cashless Pakistan, and holds governance roles at policy, education and arts institutions from Islamabad Policy Research Institute, National Academy of Performing Arts and Aitchison College Endowment Fund to The Pakistan Initiative at Harvard, the UK Institute of Directors and the London Tech Club. 

He holds an MBA in Banking from IBA Karachi and a corporate-governance qualification from INSEAD. Hungary conferred on him the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2021) for championing the restoration of 175 year old paintings by August Schoefft; he also holds an Honorary PhD from Greenwich University, the French Alumni Excellency Award and the Distinguished Formanite Award. He is the only figure from outside the Western hemisphere profiled in Scott Miller’s Master Mentors, Volume 2. 

A regular commentator on banking, economics and energy, he is the author of “Out of the Box”, his collected essays. In May 2020, he was one of only two survivors of the PK-8303 crash in Karachi, an experience that became “Seat 1C: A Survivor’s Tale of Hope, Resilience and Renewal” (2025), an international bestseller now published in Spanish and Sindhi, with Urdu, Punjabi, and French editions in progress, and its bilingual companion, “In the Courtroom of the Self: 30 Seconds of Life Before Death”, now under print. He chairs the Zafar Masud Foundation, a passenger safety advocacy initiative.