Ali Tariq joins Wayl’s Board of Directors

Since 2014, Ali Tariq has led the Iraqi Private Banks League as Executive Director — the institution that represents Iraq’s private banks and speaks for them to the Central Bank of Iraq, ministries, and international partners.

His job sits between two sides of the same table. On one side: bank chief executives. On the other: the Central Bank’s directors and Governor, plus the wider set of stakeholders who shape how money actually moves in Iraq. He also sits on committees at the Prime Minister’s office, the Central Bank, and several ministries. He represents the League in local and foreign meetings, and the League’s work includes training bank staff, capacity-building programmes, and the annual Iraqi banking conference.

He is also a board member of the Iraqi–French Business Council, which puts him in the conversation about how Iraq’s private sector connects beyond the domestic market.

When the League talks about electronic payments, Tariq is often the public voice. In recent comments he noted that Iraq had issued more than 18 million electronic payment cards, while payment points had grown from around 7,000 to nearly 60,000 — a shift driven in part by government decisions requiring public and private institutions to collect electronically. That is the landscape Wayl sells into. It is also the landscape a board director should be able to read without a briefing deck.

Fintech companies like to describe themselves as disrupting banks. In Iraq, that sentence is mostly marketing. Cards, wallets, settlements, and merchant acquiring do not float above the banking system. They run through it.

Wayl was built for merchants who need to get paid — local wallets, domestic cards, Visa and Mastercard — without assembling a stack of contracts. That product only works if the company understands how banks, regulators, and payment companies actually coordinate. Tariq’s career has been that coordination.

The appointment also matches a quieter fact about Iraq’s digital payments boom: it is a policy story as much as a product story. Cabinet decisions on e-collection, Central Bank guidance, and the League’s own campaigns to spread electronic payment culture are what moved point-of-sale terminals from thousands to tens of thousands. A board that cannot speak that language will keep shipping features while missing the constraint that matters.

We have written before that Wayl was designed as an institution that lasts, not a company that depends on a hero founder. Registration in Iraq and in Abu Dhabi Global Market, PCI DSS as a Level 1 service provider, SOC-aligned operations, and Visa certification are the public half of that claim. The private half is the board.

Ali M. Ismail and Mohammed Al-Hakim sit as directors. Tariq joins them with a different centre of gravity: the banking sector itself. Complementary seats are how a board works. Duplicate seats are how it becomes a club.

A payments company that wants to operate for decades — not a product cycle — needs directors who will still be relevant when the founding story is no longer the interesting part.

Most merchants will never sit in a board meeting. They should still care who does.

The partner behind your checkout is making decisions about compliance, settlement, risk, and which rails to keep investing in. Those decisions get better when someone at the table has spent years arguing for a healthier banking environment, training the people who run it, and translating between bank chief executives and the Central Bank.

Wayl’s job does not change tomorrow: accept payments, settle them, keep the store running. The board’s job is to make sure that work still exists in ten years. Ali Tariq is on the board to help with that.