From Auto Exports to Trading: Fahad Riaz’s Business Expansion

In Dubai’s business community, Fahad Riaz has built a growing profile. Behind the social numbers sits something older: Milele Group, the business his father founded three decades ago, which Riaz now leads as Group CEO.

Under his leadership, that family business has become a group spanning automotive, real estate, FMCG and technology, employing more than 1,000 people across multiple countries. And through every expansion, one idea repeats: take an industry that shuts ordinary people out, and open it up.

His newest venture may be his most ambitious to date. Milele Prime, the trading arm of Milele Group, is Riaz’s entry into the online brokerage space, and he is not aiming small. The ambition is to build the world’s biggest broker. The platform pairs AI-powered execution with AI coaching, built by the group’s own technology arm, so the platform is designed to help clients learn more about financial markets while placing trades. 

The move into trading did not come from nowhere. As one of the region’s largest car importers, Riaz spent years buying and selling currencies and hedging exposure across borders. What he saw frustrated him. “The market was not fair,” he says. “I traded currencies every week for my own business, and I saw the gap in execution and pricing myself. If I was going to enter this industry to complement my other companies, I decided I might as well open it up, empower the masses and educate people on how finance really works.”

It is also a bet on trust. The largest brokers in the market today, Riaz argues, are owned by people nobody ever sees, operate in only one industry, and could pack up and disappear tomorrow. Milele Prime is built as the opposite: its founder is its public face, with three decades of group legacy standing behind him. “Milele has a legacy,” he says. “We are not going anywhere. That is what trust looks like in this industry.”

The company points to several indicators of that legacy. In many of its deals, Milele finances itself. That financing instinct runs through the whole group. People who have been rejected by banks can still drive away in a car, financed by Milele itself. Add Milele Properties in real estate and the group’s FMCG operations across Africa, and across its businesses, Milele aims to make products and services more accessible to a broader range of customers.

Asked what he would tell aspiring founders, Riaz does not talk about capital. “Obsess over the industry you want to enter,” he says. “Talk to as many people as possible, learn from as many people as possible, then draw your own conclusions. By the time you enter, you should know the industry like the back of your hand. That is the only way to disrupt a market that is already made.”

It is advice he is now applying to the brokerage world, an industry he studied from the inside before deciding to take it on. His ventures have sought to introduce different approaches within the markets they serve. Watching what he does with this one may be the most interesting business story in the region over the next few years. Milele Prime is live at mileleprime.com.

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