Akash Katary

Blue is Al-Futtaim Group's loyalty and lifestyle platform, run as a standalone business inside a 33,000 employee conglomerate spanning automotive, retail, real estate, financial services and health in more than 20 countries, carrying cashback, points and partner offers across the GCC, Egypt and South East Asia. Led product for the Blue app across eight markets and 15 Al-Futtaim digital brands with three product managers and two squads of eight in engineering, design, QA and analytics, reporting to the Chief Product Officer. Ran the full app relaunch, 20 people over eight months on an 8 million USD programme rebuilding the customer journey rather than restyling the interface: monthly active users rose from 150,000 to 500,000 in the following year, registered membership from 2 million to 7.5 million. Cut sign-up abandonment from 28% to 15% by replacing the identity layer with SAP CIAM, which became Al-Futtaim's core identity platform, carried new fraud screening rules and opened the path to group-wide single sign-on. Specified and selected the vendor for AI personalisation and next best offer matching 2,000 offers from 400 merchants to individual members and lifting offer conversion, repeat visits and engagement. Rebuilt search on AI models rather than keyword matching letting members find brands and offers in plain language: fewer failed searches, faster routes to relevant offers and a new cross-sell surface. Built in house with a vendor, moved from RAG to MCP, fully live. Launched receipt intelligence end to end letting members earn points at mall brands with no system integration and progressing from basic OCR with heavy manual review to an AI model trained on sample receipts: 25,000 receipts a month at 87% accuracy, 20 weekly hours of review removed, fraud losses cut. Designed and landed the B2B merchant platform a self-serve portal and soft point of sale on subscription plus commission: 300 merchants live against a 1,000 target and a 2 million revenue target for 2026, approved by the leadership team and CEO of Blue within two months. Built the business case for travel booking and secured 4 million AED of funding plus 150,000 AED annual running cost: hotels and flights launched and returned 650,000 AED in the first eight months.

Al-Futtaim Retail is the group's retail division, holding regional franchises for Marks & Spencer, Watsons, Toys R Us, Kiabi, Sandro, Maje and Ted Baker across the GCC and Egypt. Led digital product across nine retail brands with a team of 15 reporting to the Managing Director of Digital for Retail and working across roughly 100 people in engineering, agency and market teams. Took digital from 6% to 14% of brand revenue at Sandro and Maje launching both e-commerce platforms a week apart and tripling monthly revenue from 100,000 to 300,000 AED in the first year. Migrated the Marks & Spencer flagship across eight markets in five months plus the mobile app across four, replacing a home-grown system with Kibo Commerce: margin rose from 8% to 14% under a revised M&S Global partnership that cut platform cost and commission. Ran the agile rollout across the retail division's 15 teams introducing sprints and release cycles and raising delivery velocity.

Synechron is a global digital consulting firm for financial services, working with banks, asset managers and insurers from offices across 20 countries. Cut KYC processing from 4 hours to 25 minutes for Standard Chartered Bank Singapore measured from submitted application to approval or decline across roughly 1,000 applications a month. The team running the process reduced from 22 people to 4. Ran product on HSBC Hong Kong's migration of its financial advisor compensation system from mainframe to Java microservices, writing user stories and managing delivery on a platform carrying millions of transactions for the bank's advisor population worldwide. Held the single point of contact role with the client setting roadmap, KPIs and delivery milestones, and moving cross-functional teams onto agile delivery.

BT Group is the UK's largest telecoms operator and, through BT Sport, was one of two major pay-television sports broadcasters in the UK market at the time. Owned product for KCIM, BT's key customer information management system covering customer data and information across the BT Sport website and set-top box. Delivered the interface and experience for BT Sport's new digital front end and set-top box working from the offshore delivery centre with direct UK business exposure and regular time embedded with UK teams on site.

Managed the document management platform holding close to a million documents across GE's divisions.

Delivered technology projects for enterprise clients moving from team lead into project management.

Developed and maintained applications across IBM's WebSphere suite then led the WebSphere document management team.

Built and maintained Tesco's internal portal and document management systems with time on site at Tesco's UK head office.

Product Management and Strategy

The Wharton School, Aresty Institute of Executive Education, University of Pennsylvania

Project Management Professional (PMP)

Project Management Institute