BIO
Bio
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Ajmal Samuel is transcending boundaries and redefining excellence.
He is a successful entrepreneur, a self-confessed geek, a renowned thought leader and a multi-awarded paraplegic athlete.
- Speakers Connect
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Ajmal Victor Samuel (施杰浩) is a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur, endurance athlete, adventurer and advocate for disability inclusion. He is the Founder and CEO of FTS.Money and has spent more than three decades building payment and financial-infrastructure businesses in Asia.
From soldier to software
Ajmal began his career in uniform. He was commissioned into the Pakistan Army Corps of Signals in 1986 from the Pakistan Military Academy (73rd PMA Long Course) and served in Kashmir, running military communications systems. In 1987, at the age of 21, a jeep accident on a mountain road left him paraplegic, and he has used a wheelchair ever since.
Rebuilding his life took patience and grit. Having earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Peshawar, he went on to study systems analysis and the design of information systems at the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft in Düsseldorf, Germany, graduating in 1990. From 1989 to 1992 he ran childcare programmes for The Child Care Council of the Church of Pakistan, funded by Kindernothilfe of Germany, before making Hong Kong his home in 1992.
Starting again in Hong Kong was not easy. He began as a backroom computer repair technician, founded Craver Computer Consultants in 1993 to provide IT services to NGOs and ecumenical organisations, and rose to Head of Technical Support at Pacific Rim Systems. He then ran systems operations, engineering and product for International Messaging Associates, a Silicon Valley messaging company with teams in the Philippines, managed the roll-out of automated meter reading technology in Guangzhou for Revenco International, and served as Chief Technology Officer of the listed Starbow Holdings.
Building payment businesses
In 2003 Ajmal was asked to turn around Cityline (Hong Kong) Limited, the loss-making ticketing business of the Revenco group. Over six years as President and CEO he rebuilt it into one of Hong Kong's leading online ticketing and payment companies, delivering the URBTIX system for the HKSAR Government, online ticketing for Hong Kong Disneyland, ticketing for UA Cinemas and the ticketing system for the Guangzhou Asian Games. He also formed a joint venture with China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) for a national cinema-ticketing platform.
In 2009 he co-founded ASAP Transaction Processing, a multi-channel payment platform connecting physical, online and mobile transactions with the major card schemes and banks. In 2014 he became CEO of OCTO3, which had acquired ASAP's technology, and restructured it into a cloud-based, multi-tenant payments provider serving clients from Latin America to Mongolia. He led the management buyout that created OCTO3 Group Holdings in 2015 and has chaired its board since 2016. Under his leadership OCTO3 built an ISO 8583 payments switch connecting more than 200 payment methods, a merchant acquiring host and billing system, clearing-house services for American Express and Discover/Diners, and a Host Card Emulation mobile wallet with a major card scheme.
In June 2023 he founded FTS.Money, formed by rebranding OCTO3. It provides white-label payment, remittance, digital-banking and digital-trust infrastructure to banks, payment service providers, fintechs and large merchants, and its digital-trust portfolio includes veraf.ai compliance software and KERIscan. In 2024 he founded MyVoucher.io, which lets consumers in emerging markets buy US-dollar digital vouchers with local wallets and mobile money. In August 2026 he founded TAS (Trust Anchor Service), which makes organisational identity and records independently verifiable using the KERI protocol suite.
Public service and advocacy
Ajmal has given much of his time to public life. The HKSAR Government appointed him to the Sir David Trench Fund for Recreation Committee, where he served from 2017 to 2023. He sat on the board of the Hong Kong, China Rowing Association from 2017 to 2023, as Vice Chairman from 2020, and was a Trustee and Chair of The Island School Trust from 2019 to 2022. He founded and chaired the Paratriathlon Committee of the Hong Kong Triathlon Association from 2012 to 2017, co-founded the Association for Universal Accessibility Hong Kong in 2013, which he co-chairs, and has been Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the City University of Hong Kong's Knowledge Transfer Office since 2022. In August 2021 he founded the Ajmal Samuel Foundation, a charity that promotes inclusive sport and well-being. He is a Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Directors and a member of the IEEE and the ACM.
He has campaigned for disability rights in Hong Kong since 1992, from working with banks on wheelchair-accessible ATMs to the campaign that opened the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon to wheelchair athletes in 2012. His work has been recognised with the Rick Hansen Difference Maker Award and the RTHK Outstanding Achiever Award, both in 2011, and a place on The Zubin Foundation Diversity List in 2017. He speaks regularly to companies, universities, schools, NGOs and youth groups, in English and Urdu.
Adventures
Sport replaced morphine as Ajmal's answer to chronic pain, and it has taken him around the world. In 2017 he became the first person with a disability to finish the gruelling Hong Kong Around the Island Race (ATIR) as a crew member, and in 2019 he and Augustas Navickas became the first all-disabled doubles crew to complete it. That same year he hand-cycled 2,615 km in 37 days from Beijing to Mohe, on China's border with Russia, to raise awareness of disabled sport and funds for the education of children in need. In 2023 he hand-cycled 2,525 km from Lithuania to Oslo for the iResolve challenge, and in December 2023 he rode about 400 km from Siem Reap in Cambodia to Bangkok in the Bikethon. Together, his Inclusivity Rides cover 5,540 km. He is also the first fully licensed adaptive paragliding pilot in Asia and Africa, and a certified scuba diver, qualifying as a PADI Open Water Diver in Hong Kong in 2008 and a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver in Malaysia in 2010.
Films
His adventures have been told on screen. Pendulum Control, directed by Richard Mark Dobson, follows his path to becoming a licensed adaptive paragliding pilot in South Africa. It won the Extreme Sports Award (Best Extreme Sport Film) at the Paladino d'Oro Sport Film Festival in Palermo, Italy, in December 2025, the first Hong Kong production to be honoured there, and premiered on YouTube in July 2026. His other films include A Quest to Fly (2023), Road to Mohe (2020) and Pushing Through Waves, planned for release in November 2026. He has also featured in The Pearl Report on TVB Pearl (2012), an HK01 interview (2019) and Hong Kong Stories on RTHK (2024). See all the films.
Medals
Ajmal has represented Hong Kong in para-rowing (PR1 single sculls) and was Hong Kong national champion every year from 2014 to 2019. His international results include:
Asian Championships, Korea, 2018: Gold
Australian National Championships, Sydney, 2015: Silver
European Rowing Championships, Italy, 2015: Silver
Asian Championships, Beijing, 2015: Bronze
World Championships, France, 2015: ranked 20th in the world
Asian Games, Seoul, 2014: ranked 4th in Asia