Zia Shahid
Founder & Editor, Buzdy · Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Zia built Buzdy and runs it. He is the named editor on every guide the site publishes, which means when a fee, rate or ranking on Buzdy is wrong, he is the person accountable for fixing it.
What Zia is not
Buzdy claims no financial-services qualification, licence or regulatory registration for him — not here, not in the bylines, not anywhere on the site. He does not act as a licensed or regulated financial adviser for Buzdy, and Buzdy itself is not authorised or regulated by any financial regulator. Nothing he writes is personal financial advice, and it should not be treated as a substitute for advice from a regulated professional.
His authority over this material is operational, not professional: he built the systems that collect the data, he decides what gets published and what gets withheld for being unverifiable, and he answers for the corrections. That is the honest description, and we would rather publish it than dress it up. The rules he holds himself to are on the editorial standards page.
Background
Muhammad Zia Shahid is a Dubai-based software engineer and founder with over a decade of experience building iOS, Android and full-stack products. He is not from the banking industry — he came to this subject as a consumer of it.
Buzdy exists because of that. Having lived and worked across Pakistan and the UAE, he found that the comparison tools people in North America and Western Europe take for granted simply did not exist for the Gulf, South Asia and Africa: no reliable way to line up two credit cards side by side, no dependable branch and ATM data, no honest view of what a remittance actually costs. He built Buzdy to close that gap, as a solo bootstrapped founder with no outside investment.
His day-to-day work on Buzdy is the data pipeline and the editorial rules around it — deciding which sources are acceptable, what happens when a bank does not publish a number, when a market has too little verified data to be worth a guide, and how quickly a reported error has to be resolved.
What he is responsible for
- Sourcing rules — which sources are permitted for a published figure, and the requirement that an unpublished figure is shown as Not published rather than estimated.
- Ranking rules — the mechanical order used in every comparison, and the bar a market must clear before a guide is published at all. See the methodology.
- The independence line — that no provider can pay for placement, ranking or coverage, on a site that is funded by referral commission and advertising.
- Corrections — reading reported errors and getting them fixed or the figure removed. Report one here.
- Disclosure — that affiliate links, ads and AI-generated panels are labelled where they appear.
That last figure is deliberately on this page. It is low, it is ours to improve, and hiding it would defeat the point of the page. The detail is in section 3 of our editorial standards.
Recent work
Contact
If something on Buzdy is wrong, the fastest route is the error report form — it goes to the same inbox and does not need an account.
Otherwise: [email protected] · +971 56 252 9187 · contact page. Media and provider enquiries go to the same address.
