Amnah Ajmal on SheKnows, leaving Mastercard and rebuilding the system
Amnah Ajmal, Founder and CEO of SheKnows, walked away from one of the largest businesses she had ever run because it had stopped being difficult. That instinct has governed a career built across a dozen countries and three global institutions, and it now sits underneath a commercial platform designed to sell women the one asset she believes men have always held in greater supply.
“I’ve always listened more to my heart rather than what logic says,” she said, describing a sequence of moves that included the UAE to Egypt, London to Poland, New York to the Middle East, and Singapore to Malaysia. “These are not logical choices. I do like to be in challenging situations rather than easy situations. I would change countries like people won’t even change apartments.”
The record supports the description. Ajmal has lived and worked across the Middle East and Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific and North America, holding leadership roles with Citigroup before moving to Standard Chartered in Singapore and Malaysia in global retail banking strategy and consumer banking head roles. She joined Citibank in 2004 after a run of rejections in fast-moving consumer goods, completed a master’s in finance at the London School of Economics, and made her name on the bank’s International Management Associate Programme working across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Mastercard followed in 2015, first as Head of Products for Middle East and Africa, then leading the North America product organisation out of the United States, and finally as Executive Vice President, Market Development, EEMEA, with responsibility for acceptance, acquiring, merchants, digital partnerships, fintechs, strategy and M&A. Along the way she was named among the Top 100 Women in FinTech by Lattice80 and IBM, listed twice in the Financial Technology Report US Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology, and included in Forbes Middle East’s 100 Most Powerful Businesswomen in 2024.
Leaving at the peak is the test that most senior leaders quietly fail
She has exited twice at the height of her success, and she has been direct about why. “I left banking because I didn’t think layoffs and making my career by laying off people was something that I wanted to aspire to,” she said. Payments produced the same conclusion later. “I didn’t feel that my legacy should be making multi-billion dollar businesses growing at that growth rate. I’ve done that across the world in more than 100 countries. It became easy.”
Ajmal has written a chapter of her book on the proposition that a leader should leave at the top, and she treats holding on as evidence of something closer to fear than to strength. “Holding on to your success is really not what leadership is about,” she said. “I’ve never held on to a job for more than five years. I know people, once they reach a certain position, they hold on to it for so many years. That is insecurity. That’s not having faith in yourself, in your ability to surround yourself with smarter people.”
The willingness to be fired is what separates the careers that compound
The security behind that came from a single conversation at Citigroup’s Canary Wharf office when she was 28 and a large P&L opened up in Poland, at that point the bank’s largest consumer asset business in Europe. Her boss told her to apply. She listed every reason the appointment would fail, from four years of banking experience against a predecessor in his 40s, to direct reports who would be older than her, one of whom had applied for the job herself. “Even if they hire me, I think they’ll fire me,” she recalled saying. The answer stayed with her. “He said to me, so what? I’ll hire you again. Someone else will hire you again.”
She got the job and moved from managing two people to 300. She has since worked under 42 bosses across 14 countries, all of them men, several of whom she describes as more convinced of her ability than she was. One of them, the board chair at Bank Handlowy, pushed her towards a promotion she had refused to seek, producing Poland’s first woman bank CEO. That question has become her own test for every departure since. “At the peak of your success, if I leave, so what? I’ll create the success again. I’ve created it in multiple geographies.”
The gap is not knowledge, and advice has stopped closing it
The messages Ajmal received when she left Mastercard shaped what came next. Women she had never met wrote to tell her that her exit had removed their sense of possibility. “If you leave, I believe there’s no hope for me,” she said, quoting them. “Which was pretty sad for me.”
Inside her own organisation, where 90% of her direct reports were women running substantial businesses, she watched a pattern that had nothing to do with capability. “I just noticed repeatedly, pattern after pattern, how women lack the confidence. They know their content better than men,” she said. She would recommend a candidate she rated highly and receive lukewarm interview feedback that bore no relation to the person she knew. She would walk out of client meetings having heard a colleague introduce herself in terms that shrank her own remit. “They are subject matter experts. They have all the content. They lack this confidence and self-belief.”
Her second observation concerned the architecture around them. “Happy hours are not happy for me because that’s a time for me to put my kids to bed,” she said. “The whole corporate culture is not made and designed for women. Why can’t we have breakfast meetings? Why can’t we have breakfast off-sites?” Her conclusion runs through the book and the business alike. “It’s not the time to change the women, it’s the time to change the system.”
Access, sold privately and priced deliberately, is the product
SheKnows exists because Ajmal concluded that confidence cannot be transferred through advice. “Confidence is not something where I can have a conversation with you and do some magic and pour it in you, and tomorrow you’ll be a confident person,” she said. What men have held in greater supply is access, and access is an asset she can package.
The platform launched from the UAE in May 2026 with guided growth pathways supported by curated Growth Navigators and enhanced by artificial intelligence, the term chosen as a deliberate refusal of the language of mentorship and coaching. Navigators are drawn from the UAE, Qatar, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Turkey, and include Amadou Diallo, CEO of Aramex Group. Ajmal’s own list runs to Prudential’s group CEO, Citi’s former Germany CEO, HSBC’s Chief Risk Officer, Marriott’s EMEA CCO, and Dr Najib, Head of Emirates Skywards. Sector coverage spans hospitality, logistics, financial services and technology.
The consumer model runs on three paid packages. Members submit a LinkedIn profile, select one of five tracks covering situations such as promotion interviews, personal brand, comebacks after a career break and lateral moves, and are matched with a navigator anywhere in the world. The entry package buys three private one-to-one calls, sequenced so the first defines the problem, the second reviews implementation, and the third follows up on outcomes. Group sessions are absent by design. “As a woman, you would open up more comfortably if it’s a one-to-one safe private space, and I think that’s when you get to more actionable plan-based outcome,” she said. Cross-border matching is the pricing logic as much as the product logic. “You break the geographical boundary, because it’s not that if I’m in the UAE, I can only have access to the C-suite in the UAE,” she said.
A B2B programme has since been added, aimed at organisations investing in leadership diversity that want structured pathways around the moments where women leave, including stepping into leadership, returning after a break, navigating stalled growth and redefining direction. That gives Ajmal a second revenue line priced against retention budgets rather than individual salaries, which is where the economics of the category usually settle. The market thesis behind it is a boardroom gap she can point to directly, with women holding around 14% of board seats across Africa.
What members buy is frequently smaller than they expect. Ajmal described a former colleague who told her she could only apply for product roles. “I said, who said you’re a product person? You have done go-to-market, you’ve done strategy, you interact with clients. Can you rebrand yourself?” The reply came late that night. “She said, you gave me a million-dollar piece of advice.”
Awareness has moved, and almost nothing else has
Asked whether the conversation has shifted across two decades, Ajmal was measured about the pace. “It almost looks like we take two steps forward and five steps backwards,” she said, pointing to gender equity figures and funding flows to women-owned businesses as the evidence that has stalled.
The exception is visibility. “Where progress has been made probably the most, in my humble opinion, is awareness,” she said. “If I see a stage with five men, it’s pretty odd to me. Eight years back, if somebody would see that, it would not be odd to them. Are the actions following the awareness? I don’t necessarily think so, and especially at the pace at which we need.”
SheKnows has launched in five countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with a stated goal of moving between 150,000 and 300,000 women forward in their careers, and plans to keep expanding the navigator roster through 2026. Ajmal’s own prescription returns to the guilt that stops many women before the first payment, and it doubles as the sales argument for a paid platform. She went to Harvard to study AI while building the business, and treats it as capital deployed rather than money spent. “If you don’t invest in yourself, don’t expect a return,” she said. “You’ll be where you are in your career. If you don’t ask, the answer is no.”
