Pial Islam is Managing Partner of pi STRATEGY, the Dhaka-based strategy firm he founded in 2009. For more than 25 years he has worked where banking, payments and telecom meet, with a focus on turning customers most banks overlook, small businesses and low-income households, into profitable ones.
He shaped the growth strategy for BRAC Bank, including its expansion into small-business lending, designed to double its business in four years and triple profits in eight while keeping the lowest non-performing loan ratio in the market. For a telecom operator, he built a strategy to capture a $225 million opportunity on a $40 million investment. He led the 2016 study of Bangladesh’s digital payments ecosystem for UNCDF and the government, and more recently led strategic planning for Bangladesh Bank’s Banking Sector Reform Taskforce, covering new regulations, asset quality reviews, and bank merger strategy.
Beyond advice, he has built digital platforms. This includes SMILE, which helps micro and small businesses formalize and get access to credit, and ARSHI, which tracks digitized government social safety net programs. Both serve customers who are hard to reach but essential to extending financial services to the underserved and unbanked, the segment a new breed of fintechs is best placed to win.
He has served clients in ten countries across North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, from Canada and the UK to Zambia and the Solomon Islands. He has advised the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UN agencies, the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum on financial inclusion. As WEF’s first Global Leadership Fellow from Bangladesh (2007–09), he co-led its Digital Ecosystem project on how telecom, IT and media would converge. Earlier, as a Consulting Manager in Capgemini Ernst & Young’s Strategy & Transformation practice, he helped turn General Motors’ European business into a vehicle financing company and helped launch Service Canada, a single-window government service built around the customer.
His writing on digital finance includes a World Bank/CGAP top-10 article (2019) on e-commerce and women’s financial inclusion and a paper on digital merchant payments for small businesses presented at an Oxford–LSE conference (2017). He holds a BSc in Computer Science (University of Manitoba), an MBA (UBC) and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Mason Fellow.
