Rafay Qureshi · Growth & Marketing Director
I build growth systems
that turn complexity
into revenue.
Fourteen-plus years building full-funnel growth engines across regulated fintech, luxury real estate, travel and ecommerce, connecting marketing, data and AI directly to commercial results.
Results
The numbers, with context.
Every result below comes from a specific role, at a specific company, over a specific period. Approximate figures are kept approximate.
Category experience
Three hard categories.
One way of working.
Travel, fintech and luxury real estate all sell something people have to trust before they buy. The same acquisition discipline runs through all three, applied to progressively bigger decisions.
Travel demand at scale
Seera Group / Almosafer · 2017 – 2021
Search and app growth for one of the region’s leading travel platforms: a 500,000-page programmatic SEO engine, SEM, ASO in Arabic and English, and mobile-web-to-app journeys. Traffic grew 110% and revenue 60% in 2019.
Regulated fintech growth
Rain · 2021 – 2022 · Baraka · 2025 – present
Growth for a CBB-regulated crypto exchange across six markets, then full growth ownership at a DFSA-regulated investing platform: CAC down more than 30%, funded accounts up 2.5×, and referral customers worth about 25% more than paid ones.
Luxury off-plan demand
DAMAC · 2022 – 2024 · The Heart of Europe / IHG · 2024 – 2025
At DAMAC, digital grew from 6% to 14% of group sales while cost of sale fell from 4.0% to 1.4%. At The Heart of Europe, destination marketing for the World Islands and the voco Monaco Dubai hotel, with international buyer programs across six markets.
Two complex industries
Different categories.
Similar growth challenge.
Regulated fintech
Trust at the speed of performance marketing
- Acquisition, activation, retention and LTV
- Investor education and compliance-first communication
- Product GTM: equities, ETFs, local stocks, subscriptions
- Referral, influencer and partnership ecosystems
- MMP attribution and cohort analysis
- DFSA and CBB regulated environments
- Halal and Islamic-finance positioning
High-ticket real estate
International demand for luxury off-plan
- HNWI and international investor acquisition
- Broker network activation
- Destination marketing and project launches
- Telesales channel build and CRM workflows
- Event-to-digital conversion funnels
- Pipeline management and revenue forecasting
- Sales economics: cost of sale as the operating metric
Both demand the same discipline: trust, precise targeting, sophisticated attribution, carefully designed customer journeys, and direct accountability to revenue.
Services
Six ways to work with me.
Everything below comes from work I have actually done at director level. None of it is invented for a menu.
Fractional & Interim CMO
Senior marketing leadership without the full-time hire: strategy, team, budget and board reporting, part-time or for a fixed period.
Learn more → 02Full-Funnel Growth Systems
Rebuild acquisition around CAC, cohorts and LTV: attribution, media mix, referral programs and retention working as one system.
Learn more → 03AI Marketing Transformation
Move your marketing team onto AI workflows that actually ship: content pipelines, reporting automation and quality control.
Learn more → 04Programmatic SEO & AI Search
Search systems that scale to hundreds of thousands of pages, plus optimization for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Learn more → 05Real-Estate Demand Generation
International buyer acquisition for developers: digital sales channels, broker activation, events and telesales, measured on cost of sale.
Learn more → 06Fintech & Regulated Growth
Customer acquisition inside DFSA and CBB-style rules: investor education, compliant creative and trust-first funnels.
Learn more →Case studies
The work, in detail.
Building Digital Into a Major Group Sales Channel
International investor acquisition and full-funnel discipline across one of the region’s largest luxury developers.
Re-Architecting Acquisition Around CAC, Cohorts and LTV
A DFSA-regulated investing platform rebuilt around attribution, referral economics and AI-enabled marketing operations.
Building a Destination-Led Luxury Property Revenue Engine
HNWI acquisition, broker activation, investor events and telesales unified into one off-plan revenue system on the World Islands.
Creating a 500,000-Page Programmatic SEO Platform
APIs, automation and travel-intent architecture for Saudi travel demand, one of the region’s earliest pSEO engines.
Scaling Regulated Regional Growth
Saudi and GCC growth for a CBB-regulated crypto exchange, organic engine, domain migration and compliant acquisition.
Four and a Half Years Across Saudi Digital Growth
Travel, crypto and investing, how Saudi customer behaviour, discovery and trust evolved, seen from inside three platforms.
The growth operating model
One system.
Seven stages.
The same operating model, applied from regulated fintech to luxury real estate.
Understand
Market, customer, competition, unit economics and regulation: the commercial reality before the creative work.
Architect
Positioning, journey design, measurement model, MarTech stack and channel architecture.
Acquire
Paid media, SEO, referrals, partnerships and influencers, all held to CAC and customer quality rather than channel vanity metrics.
Activate
Onboarding, CRM, product education and clean sales handoffs that turn sign-ups into funded, transacting customers.
Retain
Lifecycle programs, product engagement and cohort-value management. This is where LTV is actually made.
Automate
AI agents, workflows, reporting and content pipelines with quality control, so cycles compress without adding headcount.
Scale
Budgets, markets, teams and systems, expanded on evidence and tied to revenue.
AI-native operations
AI as an operating layer,
not a campaign gimmick.
At Baraka, an AI-native marketing operation scaled content output more than five times and cut topic-to-publish time from days to under one hour, with compliance-aware RAG keeping regulated copy on-brand by default.
Faster execution
Agentic n8n workflows connect LLMs, SEO data, sheets and CRM. Topic-to-publish in under an hour.
More output, same team
Content output up 5×+ without added headcount; assets generated, brand-checked and templated automatically.
Compliance by default
RAG over internal brand and compliance documentation keeps regulated-market copy DFSA-aware from the first draft.
Faster learning loops
Analytics agents pull campaign data, surface anomalies and report back. Reporting becomes continuous instead of monthly.
Under the hood: a personal three-agent operating stack. JARVIS handles operations, strategy, copy and outreach; IRIS runs content and SEO; ATLAS covers analytics and anomaly detection. Around them sit voice, image and video pipelines, programmatic SEO and Generative Engine Optimization.
Operating principle
“Growth is not a collection of channels. It is a connected operating system built around customer behaviour, commercial economics and continuous learning.”
Insights
Latest writing.
Fintech acquisition, real-estate demand generation, AI in marketing, programmatic SEO and what actually works in regional markets.
-
Your Next Customer Might Ask ChatGPT First
A growing share of high-intent questions, “best investment app in the UAE”, “is off-plan property safe”, are now asked to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s…
-
Referrals: The Acquisition Channel Money Can’t Buy
At Baraka, referral, influencer and partnership programs grew to roughly 35% of all customer acquisition, and the customers they brought were worth about 25%…
-
What 500,000 Landing Pages Taught Me About Programmatic SEO
At Almosafer we built one of the region’s earliest programmatic SEO platforms, more than 500,000 landing pages generated from templates, fed by live APIs…
Contact
Building something ambitious?
I’m open to selected conversations around executive growth leadership, advisory work, strategic partnerships and transformation projects.