Wikipedia:Farah Foustok

Farah Foustok (Arabic: فرح فستق) is a Lebanese businesswoman with experience in finance and investment management in Europe, Argentina and the Middle East. In 1994, she graduated with an MBA in Finance from Imperial College Business School. As of April 2022, she is a managing director and Chief Executive Officer of Lazard Asset Management in Dubai. She has been successful in teaching young women skills for becoming new leaders in the Arab World. In 2019, Foustok was awarded International Investment Woman of the Year by Women in Investment Awards in London.

Biography
According to an interview with Farah Foustok led by Rana Nawas from the podcast "When Women Win", Farah Foustok was born in 1970 (approximately) in the capital city of Lebanon, Beirut. In 1975, when the Lebanese Civil War began, her parents moved with her to London where she grew up, graduated and started off her career. Her father is Lebanese and Palestinian, and her mother is from Saudi Arabia. Foustok is a big believer of working in teams so that members can support each other and do a collaborative effort. This is the reason why, from a small age, she has always been part of a sport team and especially polo, in fact, when she was still living in London she met an Argentine polo player and moved to Argentina with him and got married to him after that. After facing economic problems in Argentina and losing everything due to inflation, Foustok returned to Europe and worked in Spain for a while where she had two children, a boy and a girl. After that she went to the Middle East with her family for the first time after leaving in 1975 and came back to the corporate world. After moving to Dubai and getting settled, Foustok got divorced in 2011 because she felt that her husband was not supportive of her entering the corporate world again and becoming financially independent and also busy all the time.

Career
Farah Foustok studied and graduated from King's College London (1989–1992) where she received a bachelor degree in Mathematics and Business Management, Then she got her MBA in Finance from Imperial College Business School (1993–1994). Foustok is a Lebanese women who lived in different countries in Europe and lived in Argentina for some time, now working in Dubai, from her experience she learned to speak Arabic, English and Spanish. According to an interview with Foustok on the podcast "The MindTales Collective", At the start of the pandemic in 2020, she took a course in learning about the field of positive psychology in the University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, she also entered a course in sustainable finance in University of Cambridge. Foustok also talks a lot about the importance of sports, especially team sports and how it builds character and helps young people and females in specific to become more determined and cooperative which helps a lot in the corporate world. Foustok also emphasizes the importance of focus on building relationships and the use of social media which helps a lot in business.

When Foustok first started building her portfolio in the investment world, she mainly worked in the private market through friends and family or people that she trusted because of the transparency of their business. Foustok started working in investment in 1994, spent five years at Deutsche Bank in London in equity strategy and also worked at Morgan Stanley within equity sales but then left the industry because of the lack of people who motivated her or advised her. After resigning, she worked in Argentina with her husband at the time to work in hospitality and build a boutique hotel where families could go enjoy a vacation and play polo but after a year of that, because of the inflation and other economic factors they lost everything and were broke. Following that, she went back to the United Kingdom and did some projects to refinance to go back to business. After refinancing, she practiced three years in commercial real estate advisory in Europe especially in Spain. She also was a senior fund manager at EFG-Hermes. In 2005, Foustok came back to the middle east for the first time after leaving it in 1975, she worked as Head of Asset Management at National Bank of Dubai (2006–2009) then became a CEO at ING Investment Management (2008–2014) and is now a CEO at Lazard Asset Management.

When Foustok came to work in the Middle East in 2005, she saw how women are treated so differently than how they were treated in the West, and she noticed that most of the leaders are men and that gave her motive to start working on institutions to help women develop important skills and help grow new female leaders in the Arab world. In 2012 Foustok was elected as the chairperson of the board for the UAE Financial Services Association. In 2013, Foustok encountered a lot of women who wanted some guidance and help to work and start their career in the Middle East where they didn't have proper guidance at the time and that was the reason that pushed her to co-found the first non-profit female mentoring program REACH in the DIFC to mentor women in the corporate world. In 2015 Foustok co-founded and chaired the Steering Committee for the MENA chapter of the 30% club to develop & promote female leadership in the region. In 2020, she launched TARA, speed mentoring future female leaders in the financial services platform to create a connection between the educational sector and the corporate world for women in order to develop future female leaders and help them have a circle of guidance or mentors.

Awards and Achievements
In 2019, Foustok was awarded International Investment Woman of the Year by Women in Investment Awards, London.

In 2021, Farah Foustok was ranked #44 in the Middle East's Power Businesswomen on Forbes Lists.