Episode XII: She Means Business
Faiza Syed, Global Director of Commercial Strategy & Client Experience at Interpolitan Money
The Life She Didn’t Plan
At 17, Faiza Syed thought she knew where her life was heading.
A first-generation migrant growing up in Britain, she was bright, driven and determined to succeed. She dreamed first of becoming a doctor, then a barrister.
Then both of her parents died.
Faiza was left with two younger brothers, aged 15 and 11, and an unimaginable choice: continue her education or fight to keep her brothers from going into care.
She chose her brothers.
Still legally a minor herself, Faiza gave up her education, took a job as a hotel switchboard operator and convinced the authorities that she could care for them. There was no grand plan, she tells me. She simply knew she had to get to the other side.
Life continued to move quickly. She married at 19, became a mother and, by 21, was divorced and raising her daughter as a single parent. Her daughter became her purpose and the lens through which she made decisions about work, money and the future she wanted to build.
What followed was anything but a conventional career.
From a hotel switchboard to sales, selling cars, construction, global customer experience and eventually financial services, Faiza kept stepping through doors—sometimes opened by people who saw something in her before she recognised it herself.
Today, she is Global Director of Commercial Strategy & Client Experience at Interpolitan Money. Yet the most interesting part of Faiza’s story isn’t the impressive title or how far she has travelled.
It is what she has learned along the way.
For years, strength meant being the person who could cope, provide, protect and keep going. Now she understands something her younger self did not: being capable of carrying everything doesn’t mean you should.
In this month’s She Means Business, Faiza and I talk about loss, motherhood, ambition, reinvention, asking for help—and what happens when the life you never planned becomes the making of you.