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VP & Unit Head — AI & Machine Learning · Askari Bank

From research lab to banking floor: AI that ships.

I built Askari Bank's centralised AI function from a standing start — the team, the operating model, and more than thirty AI initiatives the bank owns outright. No vendor dependency, no licence fees, and nothing we cannot inspect.

Dr Mehak Rafiq

30+

AI systems built across banking, consulting and research

15+

Departments served

2.3M+

People reached: customers, staff and students

$700K+

Costs saved for the bank and for clients

0

Model licence fees

Recent Milestones

Group photo in the lobby of the National Science and Technology Park.

Hosting the Board at the National Science and Technology Park

Sep 2026

Hosted a Board Member with the President & CEO, CFO and CDO at the National Science and Technology Park, Islamabad.

Mehak with two colleagues on stage at the bank's awards event.

Q1 High Achiever Award

May 2026

Recognised by the bank for building its AI function in-house, from the team to the infrastructure it runs on.

Learn more
Mehak receiving the award at the Advantage AI Pakistan masterclass.

Fastest to Impact Award

Apr 2026

Won the AI Builder Awards war-room challenge at the Advantage AI Pakistan masterclass in Lahore, for the quickest deployment-ready AI solution.

A round table of light seen from above.

Secretary, “Bank of the Future” forum

Since Oct 2025

Secretary to the President & CEO's forum that sets the agenda for the bank's digital transformation.

A single glowing paper rising from a dark stack.

Best Paper Award, IEEE ICET

2023

Recognised for research presented at the IEEE ICET conference.

An empty lecture hall with one lectern lit in gold.

Excellence in Teaching Award

2021

Awarded by NUST for teaching machine learning and data analytics.

Project Highlights

See all
Voice waveform on a phone, ringed with light.

VoicePay

Banking for people who cannot type: 14 voice tasks in Urdu, English, Punjabi and Pashto. More than 20,000 people use it every day, and every one of the bank's 2.3 million customers can.

Message icons converging on a single point of light.

Askari Buddy

A 24/7 assistant on the bank's website. Roughly 1,500 calls a month moved off the phones, across 20,000 messages and 8,000 conversations.

Pakistan rendered as a lit network of branch cash routes.

Cash Optimisation

PKR 3B of surplus branch cash released in just 1 quarter. It forecasts what every branch needs and moves the rest back to work.

A glowing assistant core inside a vault of dark glass.

A private AI copilot for the whole bank

The bank's own assistant for every employee, running on models the bank hosts itself. Nothing leaves the building.

Documents streaming into ordered, lit columns.

AI email triage

500+ customer emails a day read, sorted and routed to the right owner, answered within SLA.

A telephone handset of blue light whose sound becomes rising gold bar charts.

Conversation intelligence

AI that listens to service calls, scores their quality, and spots the product each customer is likely to need next.

Documents in motion with one flagged in red.

An AI financial-crime stack

165,000+ names screened every day at full coverage, by six tools across sanctions, adverse media, trade-based money laundering and fraud.

A wheat field at dusk, each stalk outlined in gold light.

Credit scoring for farmers

A scorecard that lets the bank lend to farmers on data rather than paperwork, widening credit to people banks usually miss.

What clients say

“Mehak is a phenomenal computational biologist.”
Single-cell genomics client
“She combines technical expertise with a deep understanding of practical application.”
Data science client
“She clearly understood the difference between doing the work and mentoring a student to truly understand and own the work.”
Mentoring client
“A strong research-oriented approach. She expertly handled diverse datasets.”
Data engineering client
“She completed a wide range of data science tasks with outstanding success.”
Analytics client
“Very happy working with Mehak and her proactive and enthusiastic attitude.”
Medical AI client

Ask me anything

My AI assistant answers from public material about my work.

Mehak's AI assistant

Ask what I have built, how I would set up an AI function and its infrastructure, or where my research sits. It answers from public material only, and says so when it does not know.

Let's talk.

I speak with boards, search partners, and founders building AI in regulated markets.

Get in touchSee my impact