Before there were international events and an industry association title, there was a scratch card. Samad Saleem’s early company, Etrendz, used the familiar prepaid format to sell access to domain names and hosting in Pakistan. Customers who lacked a credit card could still buy a place on the internet. A thoroughly digital ambition had acquired a pleasingly physical front door.
It is an unusually useful detail in a founder’s history. A domain name can be available to everyone in theory and awkward to purchase in practice. Etrendz addressed the purchase. The cleverness lay in noticing the obstruction between the customer and the product, then choosing a mechanism the customer could actually use. Sometimes the future requires a card you can scratch.
Saleem says he began that venture at 23 and reached more than 3,000 clients within two years. He also says it went offline after mistakes. The customers and the closure belong in the same account. Demand had been established; the business still failed. That combination gives his later career a less tidy, more interesting beginning than a procession of certificates would have done.
He continued trying businesses. DigiTrends became the enterprise through which his interest in technology developed into software services across markets. Its public company history dates its beginnings to 2010. The early experiment remained a useful point of reference: find a practical obstacle, make something that removes it, and persuade people to put it to work.
The client has to live with it
DigiTrends sells the kind of work that stays behind after a presentation ends: websites, mobile applications, enterprise software and the design and development that hold those things together. Saleem’s role is to lead a business whose output must operate inside somebody else’s business. It is a relationship with an unusually effective critic. The client gets to use the result every day.
His account of the company’s delivery model puts software development, content and interface design inside the organization. That arrangement matters because a product crosses several disciplines before a customer ever touches it. A beautifully written specification cannot rescue a confusing interface. Nor does an elegant screen excuse an unreliable system. Bringing the work together makes coordination part of the offer.
The payment model he describes is equally concrete. Projects are divided into milestones, with payment tied to agreed stages. For a customer buying a complicated piece of software, intermediate goals make progress something that can be examined. For the supplier, those goals create a succession of promises that must be kept. Trust has a schedule.
“Our clients’ trust has driven our growth and success,” Saleem says. It is a plain sentence with a demanding implication. A service company can win attention with its portfolio; keeping a relationship requires responding when a customer wants a change, a clarification or a repair. His emphasis on feedback and support makes that continuing relationship part of the business rather than an afterthought.
“Our clients’ trust has driven our growth and success.”Samad Saleem
Finance, one practical problem at a time
The move into financial technology gives his original interest in access a new setting. DigiTrends’ Saudi product catalogue lays out a business concerned with investment management and the operations surrounding it. Its contents include customer onboarding, identity checks, fund flows, reporting and connections between systems. These are the workings behind a transaction, where convenience depends on several unglamorous things happening correctly.
The names are revealing: OnBoardEase, Easy KYC, Fund InFlow, Invest Report and Connect All. Each names a task, or the desired relief from one. Taken together, they describe a company approaching financial software through a set of specific operational needs. The catalogue also includes discovery, consultation and process reengineering, acknowledging that writing software is only one part of changing how an organization works.
In his catalogue message, Saleem identifies 2022–2024 as a significant period of learning, relationship building and product development in finance. Those dates give the expansion some substance. A move into a sector becomes more legible when there are products to inspect and processes to discuss. Ambition, which is available in generous quantities at any business gathering, has to acquire an implementation.
His public advice to students at Muhammad Ali Jinnah University follows the same practical line: validate the strategy and understand the market before building the technology. The appeal is easy to see. Developers can make an excellent answer to a question nobody asked. Saleem’s emphasis puts the question first, a discipline that would have been quite at home in the scratch-card business.
The suitcase becomes office equipment
International expansion appears in Saleem’s career as meetings, collaborators and a recurring presence at industry gatherings. DigiTrends records his participation with Saudi regional head Zeeshan Rehman at Finnovex Summit 2024. The event photographs show the familiar working scenery of an international services business: badges, booths, panels and conversations around tables. The software may travel electronically. Relationships still accumulate air miles.
The company also records his attendance at Seamless Saudi Arabia in Riyadh with chief technology officer Talha Ahmed and sales and marketing manager Nimra Chauhan in 2025. These appearances place him alongside colleagues with different responsibilities. A CEO may introduce the company, but technical and commercial conversations require people who can answer different kinds of questions.
Ahmed also joins Saleem in a CxO Global Forum podcast about building DigiTrends. The pairing gives the company’s history two professional perspectives, commercial leadership and technology leadership. Host Kanwal Masroor Badvi brings them into the same conversation. It is a useful counterweight to the convention of telling a company’s story as though everyone except the founder had wandered into the room by accident.
His LinkedIn profile lists Riyadh as his location. The company he leads has connections across Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other international markets. That combination helps explain why market access has become such a visible part of his public agenda. He has a business reason to care about the distance between having technical ability and getting a hearing from an overseas customer.
A manifesto with electricity in it
In P@SHA’s 2024 election booklet, Saleem’s promises are strikingly earthbound. They cover bringing IT companies together, salary taxation, industry-ready skills, infrastructure and overseas expansion. Better internet and electricity sit beside access to the GCC and European Union. The glamorous ambition of exporting technology shares a page with the decidedly practical requirement that the connection stay on.
The education proposal calls for closer alignment between academia and employers. It treats the supply of skilled people as something that institutions and businesses have to work on together. The market-access proposal asks for engagement with governments to improve business conditions abroad. Both broaden the unit of concern beyond DigiTrends and its next contract.
There is a consistent commercial logic in that selection. A software company needs people who can do the work, infrastructure that lets them deliver it and customers able to buy it. Taxation affects the employment proposition. Collective representation affects how effectively the industry can make its case. These promises concern the conditions around a product as much as the product itself.
A manifesto records intentions. Its value here is the specificity of what Saleem chose to put forward before his later leadership appointment. Internet, electricity, skills and market entry offer a more useful picture of his public priorities than a broad promise to encourage innovation. They also give industry members something recognizable against which to judge the work that follows.
A wider brief for 2026–2028
By the end of September 2026, Saleem had been elected P@SHA vice chairman for the 2026–2028 term. Dr. Shoab Ahmed Khan became chairman and Wahab Yunus senior vice chairman. For the DigiTrends founder, the appointment adds an industry role to his company responsibilities. He now participates in leadership concerned with businesses that have their own customers, strategies and competing interests.
That change of scale is consequential. Running a company permits a relatively direct relationship between a decision and the team carrying it out. An association has to represent members whose circumstances differ. A policy that suits one firm may raise questions for another. Listening, negotiation and the ability to describe a shared problem become part of the job.
His September campaign agenda emphasized regulatory support, talent and access to GCC and North American markets. Read alongside the earlier manifesto, the themes show continuity. The questions have remained close to the daily concerns of running and expanding a technology business. The new title provides a place to pursue them with colleagues across the industry.
The term stretches to 2028. Its interest lies in what the leadership can turn into useful conditions for member companies: clearer engagement, relevant skills and routes into markets. Those are objectives rather than completed results. For Saleem, a larger platform brings a larger set of people who will want to see what happens after the announcement.
A two-year industry leadership brief
The founder, after the announcement
There is a quieter register in Saleem’s account of his life. He values meals and conversation with family, and discussions with friends interested in technology. He has described himself as self-critical and willing to learn from mistakes. Those details bring the story back to a person who has lived through a business closing, rather than a title that appears fully formed on a company page.
The scratch card remains the most memorable object in that history. It connects an ambitious idea with an everyday purchasing problem. His later work has acquired more products, colleagues and institutional responsibilities, but the useful question remains close to the original one: what is preventing somebody from taking the next step? A founder can spend a career learning how many different answers that question has.
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