My Morning Routine: Hassan Abdelgelil, Director of FP&A, Investments, and IR at Fawry

Hassan Abdelgelil, Director of FP&A, Investments, and IR at Fawry: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Hassan Abdelgelil (LinkedIn), Director of FP&A, Investments, and IR at Fawry.

Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My path into finance started almost by accident, sparked by a pull toward numbers, investments, and financial decision-making that I discovered at university and never let go of. After graduating, I completed military service, followed by a commercial analyst role at Etisalat that wasn’t really finance either. That's when I began studying for my CFA, to actually break into the field. Before that, I'd also worked an accounting job at ExxonMobil. My first true break came after more than three years, when I joined CI Capital as an equity research analyst covering fintech and telecom names across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman.

My role today spans financial planning and analysis (FP&A), investments, and investor relations (IR). The three feed into each other far more than people expect. As the FP&A person, I translate the company’s strategic plans into numbers and track their impact on earnings and losses, which makes me far more comfortable communicating those same plans to investors. On the investment side, it ties back to strategy too: when we identify a sector we want to grow in, we look for companies that complement what we’re already building, and that’s where M&A conversations start.

Moving from analyzing a company to running its numbers from the inside turned out to be a bigger shift than I expected. As a research analyst, you have real insight into a company’s strategy and industry, but you’re working with a lag, assessing a quarter that may have ended weeks earlier. Inside the company, you’re working off daily changes and have to be far more active, since decisions need to be made within the quarter to actually be implemented. What you lose in immediacy, though, you gain in a clearer view of the macro environment, something that’s harder to track once you’re inside the day-to-day.

Fawry is in the business of financial services for everyone, from micro and small enterprises (SMEs) to individual consumers and large companies alike. We started with payments and are still growing that business, but we’ve expanded into financial services more broadly: lending, ins., payroll solutions, and more. We believe there’s a gap in the offerings for the micro and SME segment especially. The goal is to embed these services into the daily lives of the people and businesses we serve through a digital-first approach that keeps our cost to serve low enough to scale.

By 8am, I’m up and scanning my inbox for anything urgent before the day takes over. I fit in a short workout routine, although most of my actual training happens later. After that, I get ready, help with the kids, get my son to nursery and my daughter to school. My commute from New Cairo to Smart Village takes about an hour, and I use it differently depending on the day: sometimes work calls, sometimes an audiobook, sometimes just catching up with family.

Once I reach the office, the first thing I do is read EnterpriseAM to catch up on what’s moving the market. Since the Egyptian Exchange opens around when I get in, I check in on market movement several times throughout the day, at least four or five times.

I structure my day so both work and family get real attention. Mornings are usually FP&A-focused with my team, and I’ve started fitting my workouts into midday, using that as a natural break between team-heavy work and the more independent projects I tackle afterward.

My weekends are entirely for my family. My daughter plays three different sports, so weekends are a fairly packed schedule that my wife manages during the week, and I help cover when I’m off. Outside of work, I’m a former swimmer, and I still swim weekly, run two to three times a week, and play football roughly every other week.

Lately, I’ve been drawn to sharpening specific skills, which is why I’ve been leaning toward strategy books. I’ve realized I don’t read enough, so I’ve been trying to fix that, mostly through audiobooks for now, though I think actual reading would serve me better. The last book I got through was The 48 Laws of Power.

“If you want to grow, you need to step outside your job description and do the things nobody expects” is the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten, and it came from my first manager, Omneya Hamza, back at Etisalat. She told me this in the middle of a conversation about a new project nobody wanted to touch, not because anyone was asking me to take it on, but because that’s how you actually scale in your career.

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