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The Investment Ambassador
October 3, 2011
Business Today Egypt
By Randa El Tahawy
Karim Helal, the former CEO of CI Capital, is known in the world of investment banking as a visionary for his key insights into the Egyptian market and his approach to banking and transactions.
After joining CI Capital in 2008, Helal launched the company’s first small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) fund in Egypt as well as the Look East Initiative that builds entrepreneurial ties between Egypt and the Far East.
“I always believed in SMEs — my whole approach was really to engrain the culture of integrity all the way in [its] relationship to banking,” he says.
One project that Helal is excited about, and understandably so, is the ASEAN Egyptian Business Association, a newly established NGO that Helal is chairing which develops relations between Egypt and ASEAN countries. (It is also one of the first business associations to be established after the January 25 Revolution.)
The organization will help bridge gaps on issues like trade and investment laws and create cultural exchanges, which will in turn foster business opportunities, explains Helal.
“It is time that Egypt developed a really strong relationship with these nations of the world. It is a market which has 700 million consumers and has developed expertise and skills in so many areas that we need, it doesn’t make sense that we are lagging so much behind,” he says.
Helal was also recently appointed the Saudi Egyptian Business Counsellor, a position he hopes will foster economic investment relations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, one of Egypt’s most important regional trading partners.
Journey to success
Helal’s path has always been tied to banking. In 1971, he graduated from Cairo University’s Business School and began his career with the Arab International Bank. After a few months, he moved to the Arab African Bank and helped establish the first international finance department in Egypt. The youngest manager at that time, Helal’s dedication made him a prime candidate to open a branch in Bahrain in 1978, where he stayed for four years.
“I went straight into banking — it’s like I always knew what I wanted to do,” he says. Later on, he managed another bank based in Bahrain that had branches in Hong Kong, Malaysia and London, where he eventually lived for 10 years. He set up a boutique investment bank there in 1982.
When Helal came back to Egypt in the early 1990s, his took a break from banking and learned how to scuba dive. But his business drive couldn’t be dampened, leading him to turn his scuba hobby into a small business that helped establish scuba diving schools and diving centers across Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada. He was integral in introducing professional diving techniques to local instructors and formalizing the business of diving in the two cities. He also founded the first NGO for diving and water sports and was the first chairman of the Touristic Chamber of Diving and Water Sports.
Helal says his goal was promoting Egypt as a dive destination internationally, as well as convincing people that diving has the potential to be a multi-million pound business here. In addition, Helal wanted to create job opportunities for Egyptians in a sector usually dominated by Europeans due to the expense of training and an unfair social stigma attached to Egyptian diving instructors.
Both reasons led him to launch a sponsored program in Hurghada to train 20 young Egyptians as diving instructors for free.
“They graduated as instructors and the only thing I asked from them was to train 10 Egyptians to create a pyramid. They have all been working. Some have their own diving centers or became managers, and it just changed their life. If you give somebody a chance to change their life, their whole life is turned around,” he says.
Read the full article here.