President & CEO, The Bank of Punjab
Zafar Masud is a Pakistani banker, thought-leader, public-policy figure, philanthropist and an author with over three decades of leadership across development finance, energy, and corporate governance.
He is President & CEO of The Bank of Punjab, the largest priority-sector financing bank in Pakistan with an US$ 9 billion balance sheet and more than 15,000 employees. Since taking charge in April 2020, he has led a transformation that has more than doubled the bank’s deposits, lending, and profits, and repositioned it around digital banking, strong governance, and a culture built on empathy and compassion. The Bank is the number one Digital Lender, Credit Card Issuer, SME, Agriculture, Low-cost Housing and women-entrepreneurship financing in Pakistan.
He also serves as non-executive Chairman of Oil & Gas Development Company (OGDC), Pakistan’s largest listed entity and listed on the London Stock Exchange with current production of over 40,000 BPD oil & 650 MMSCFD gas, with ~50% of the market share and booked proven + probable reserves of ~755 MMBOE (worth roughly US $8–11 billion on an NPV basis) with large unexplored, unbooked acreage covering 40% of Pakistan’s exploration area.
He is the elected Chairman of the Pakistan Banks Association and Chairman of the Zafar Masud Foundation, and convened country’s largest interest-free lending priority sector programmes.
Earlier, he held senior roles at American Express, Citigroup, Dubai Islamic Bank, and Barclays — where he served as Regional Managing Director for Southern Africa. He joined the Board of the State Bank of Pakistan in 2013, including a seat on its constitutionally independent Monetary Policy Committee. From 2016 to 2018, as Director General of National Savings, he led the agency’s first digital overhaul with support from the Gates Foundation, FCDO, USAID, and the World Bank, and launched dedicated savings schemes for people with disabilities, the families of martyrs, and overseas Pakistanis. He served as founding CEO of InfraZamin Pakistan, country’s first private-sector creditenhancement company for social infrastructure.
He sits on boards and committees spanning energy, ports & aviation, education & economic thinktanks, and the arts — including Pakistan Airports Authority, RAAST Payments, Islamabad Policy Research Institute, National Institute of Banking & Finance, National Academy of Performing Arts, Aitchison College Endowment Fund, The Pakistan Initiative (TPI) at Harvard (USA), Open London (UK), Institute of Directors (UK), INSEAD National Alumni Association (France), and Prime Minister’s Committee on Homegrown Economic Transformation.
He holds an MBA in Banking from IBA Karachi (1993) and a qualification in Corporate Governance from INSEAD, Fontainebleau. In 2021, he received Hungary’s highest civil award for championing the restoration of 175-year-old subcontinental paintings by the Hungarian artist August Schoefft. He has been honoured with French Alumni Excellency Award, Distinguished Formanite Award, and Honorary PhD by Greenwich University. He is the only figure from outside the Western hemisphere featured in Scott Miller’s Master Mentors: 30 Transformative Insights from the Greatest Minds, Volume 2.
A regular commentator in Pakistani and international media on banking, economics, and energy, he is the author of “Out of the Box”, collections of his newspaper essays. In May 2020, he was one of only two survivors of the PK-8303 plane crash in Karachi. That experience became the subject of his international bestseller “Seat 1C: A Survivor’s Tale of Hope, Resilience and Renewal (2025)” — now translated into Spanish, with French, Urdu and Sindhi editions forthcoming — and is currently working on the companion booklet “In the Courtroom of the Self: 30 Seconds Life Before Death”.