Fahad Riaz Takes Milele Group Into Online Brokerage With Milele Prime

Fahad Riaz has become a familiar name in Dubai's business circles as Group CEO of Milele Group, the company his father founded three decades ago. Under him the group has grown into automotive, real estate, FMCG and technology operations, with more than 1,000 employees spread across several countries.

The automotive side remains one of the region's largest car importers. Its newest addition does not move vehicles at all. Milele Prime, the group's trading arm, marks Riaz's entry into online brokerage, and it was built by Milele's own technology team rather than bought in. The platform pairs AI-driven execution with AI coaching, so clients can study financial markets while they place trades. It is live at mileleprime.com.

Riaz's stated goal for it is large: to build the world's biggest broker. His reasoning comes from personal experience. He spent years buying and selling currencies and hedging exposure across borders, trading weekly for his own businesses. What he found, he said, was a market that was not fair — gaps in execution and in pricing that he could see for himself.

He said he entered the industry to complement his other companies, to empower ordinary people and to educate them on how finance actually works. That framing matches his wider approach of opening up industries that shut ordinary people out.

What he says the incumbents lack

Riaz argues that the largest brokers today share three traits: they are owned by people nobody ever sees, they operate in a single industry, and they could pack up and disappear tomorrow. Milele Prime, by contrast, puts him in public view with three decades of group history behind him. Milele has a legacy and is not going anywhere, he said. That, in his description, is what trust looks like in this industry.

The trading arm leans on the wider group for more than a name. In many of its deals Milele finances itself, which means a customer turned down by a bank can still drive away in a car funded by the company. Milele Properties covers real estate, and FMCG operations run across Africa. The stated aim across those businesses is the same: make products and services reachable by a broader range of customers.

Advice for founders

To founders, Riaz offers a narrow prescription. Pick the industry you want to enter and obsess over it. Talk to as many people in it as you can, learn from them, then form your own conclusions. By the time you launch, you should know the field thoroughly — deep knowledge, in his view, is the only route to disrupting a market that has already been made. He followed that path himself, studying brokerage from the inside before committing to it.

That migration, from importing cars to running a trading platform, says something about how the group's balance sheet is being put to work. Trust in brokerage usually rests on regulation and brand. Here it rests partly on a company that lends to the customers banks reject. Whether that carries over into currency and asset trading is the question the platform will have to answer.

Investing involves risk, and investments may lose value. Past performance gives no indication of future results. The statements above do not constitute and cannot replace investment advice.