About
Zakaria Swapan founded iPay Systems in 2015, launching Bangladesh's first licensed non-bank digital wallet in 2018. A former Avaya and Cisco engineer turned ser...
Company & Background
Personal Details
Expertise
FinTech, Digital Payments, Social Media Platforms
Education
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Texas A&M University
Company Details
Stage
Established
Industry
FinTech & Digital Payments
Founded Year
2015
About Zakaria Swapan
Zakaria Swapan is the Founder and CEO of iPay Systems Ltd., the company behind iPay, Bangladesh's first licensed non-bank digital wallet. He arrived at fintech only after building a career spanning enterprise telecom engineering, an internet media company, and a career as a published author.
An Engineer Before a Founder
Swapan holds a BSc in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and an MS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. Before starting his own companies, he worked in enterprise technology roles at Avaya and Cisco Systems, including a stretch at Avaya as a Product Line Manager building a new unified communications platform.
That corporate engineering background gave him deep experience with large-scale platform architecture, skills he later applied to building payment infrastructure rather than communications systems.
Building Priyo Before iPay
Before founding iPay Systems, Swapan built Priyo into the fastest-growing internet portal in the Bengali language, reaching more than 10 million users worldwide. That earlier venture gave him firsthand experience scaling a consumer internet product for Bangladeshi and Bengali-speaking audiences before he moved into financial technology.
The jump from a media portal to a licensed digital wallet was not a small one, but it drew on the same instinct for identifying underserved digital infrastructure in Bangladesh's market.
Launching iPay
Swapan founded iPay Systems Ltd. in October 2015, and the company commercially launched its iPay Wallet in March 2018 as the first non-bank digital payment platform in Bangladesh. The wallet let users make payments, recharge mobile balances, and pay bills without handling cash, while staying fully connected to the existing banking network.
That licensing status as a Payment Service Provider set iPay apart from informal mobile payment workarounds that had existed in the market before it.
A Writer Alongside a Founder
Outside his technology ventures, Swapan is the author of roughly 20 books, most of them science fiction, alongside several novels. That parallel creative career has run alongside his entrepreneurial one for years, giving him a public profile in Bangladesh that extends beyond the fintech and internet sectors he has built companies in.
Swapan continues to lead iPay Systems today, with a stated mission of building a financial operating system that reaches the country's broader working population.