Mohamed Jaafar
I build financial tools for people the system forgot.
The Short Version
Backend engineer. Founder. MSc Financial Technology (London). Building Fifi Terminal — Bloomberg for emerging markets.
I write Go, ship microservices, and care deeply about ethical finance — specifically, making financial infrastructure that's Shariah-compliant, transparent, and actually accessible.
The Longer Version
I started trading forex at 18. Got wrecked. Learned. Kept going.
That experience taught me two things: (1) financial literacy is a privilege, not a default, and (2) the tools that exist for retail traders — especially in Africa and the Middle East — are garbage.
So I started building. First at fintechs in East Africa — Fingo Africa and others — shipping payment rails, card systems, KYC integrations, and AI support bots. I got obsessed with uptime (99.9%), with event-driven architectures that actually scale, with dashboards that tell the truth.
Now I'm building my own thing. Fifi Terminal is the market intelligence tool I wished existed — real-time data on African and MENA markets, news with sentiment analysis, AI research assistant. Zabili is prediction markets done right — Rust matching engine, on-chain settlement.
I also care about Islamic finance. Not as a niche, but as a lens: what would financial infrastructure look like if it was built from first principles around transparency, fairness, and no riba (interest)? That's what I'm exploring with Habib (halal investing + Zakat automation) and Golum Screener (Shariah + ESG screening for global equities).
How I Work
- Tech: Go (primary), gRPC/REST, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, Docker/K8s on AWS. Occasionally Rust, Python, Next.js.
- Style: Hexagonal architecture. Event-driven. Observability from day one (Grafana, Prometheus, PostHog).
- Philosophy: Ship useful things. Keep users safe. Measure honestly. Learn in public.
Currently
- MSc Financial Technology — London
- Building Fifi Terminal
- Writing more (trying to, anyway)
- Reading: check Goodreads
Get in Touch
I like talking to people building interesting things — especially in payments, open banking, ethical finance, or AI-native products.