CFI Financial Group has appointed Federico Cirulli as Chairman of its Board of Directors, a move the online trading and investment group described as the latest step in its evolution into a more institutional and scalable organisation. The appointment was announced on 2 September 2026 and follows what the group characterised as a period of record trading performance and continued international expansion.
The change reshapes the top of the board. Co-founders Hisham Mansour and Eduardo Fakhoury, who had served as Chairman and Vice Chairman respectively, will transition to Non-Executive Director roles. Both remain on the board, and the group said its executive management team and wider strategy stay in place, framing the handover as an orderly step in a planned governance evolution rather than a change of direction.
Cirulli brings more than two decades of leadership experience across regulated financial services, including chief executive and senior roles in brokerage and asset management. The group said his experience spans business leadership, governance, regulation, international growth and the scaling of regulated financial services businesses, and that he will work closely with management on scalability, operational excellence and international expansion.
The chairmanship caps a governance overhaul that CFI has pursued over the past two years. Ziad Melhem was appointed Group Chief Executive Officer in June 2025, and independent members were added to the board in November 2025. Placing an independent chairman alongside an independent board and an established executive team completes a structure more typical of an institutional financial group than a founder-led brokerage.
The reshaping reflects a wider pattern among fast-growing brokerages in the Gulf and beyond, where founders who built their businesses on entrepreneurial speed increasingly hand day-to-day governance to independent directors as regulatory obligations multiply across the markets they serve. For a group that operates across multiple jurisdictions, each new licence adds a regulator and a set of client protection expectations, which makes board independence a competitive question as much as a compliance one.
Company leaders framed the appointment in those terms. Mansour said the founders had built CFI with the ambition for it to grow beyond them and continue evolving for the long term, and described Cirulli as a seasoned professional he had worked with for many years. Melhem said that every market the group enters adds a licence, a regulator and clients who expect it to be there for the long term, and that governance therefore matters as much as growth. Cirulli said his focus would be on working with the board and management to keep the group growing with discipline, strong governance and high standards as it scales across markets, products and services.
For a business that has grown from a founder-led venture into a multi-market operation, the message to regulators, partners and clients is that oversight is being formalised as the group widens its ambitions. Whether the new structure delivers the disciplined expansion it promises will be judged over the coming financial year, but the direction of travel, toward an institutional model with independent oversight at the top, is now clearly set.
