CFI Financial Group has appointed Federico Cirulli as Chairman of the Board, while co-founders Hisham Mansour and Eduardo Fakhoury move into non-executive director roles in the latest overhaul of the broker’s governance structure during a period of rapid international growth.
Cirulli succeeds Mansour as Chairman after joining CFI’s board only in November 2025 as one of three independent directors. Fakhoury, who had served as Vice Chairman, will also relinquish that role. Both founders will remain on the board as Non-Executive Directors and retain their involvement with the group, CFI said.
The broker said its executive management team and strategy remain unchanged, meaning Ziad Melhem continues to run the business as Group Chief Executive Officer. CFI described the new structure as part of its effort to develop a more institutional and scalable organization as its operations grow across countries and regulatory regimes.
Cirulli will lead the board and work with Melhem and CFI’s executive team on international expansion, operational performance and governance.
The appointment gives an independent director the chairmanship less than a year after CFI brought outsiders onto a board that had historically been closely associated with its founders.
Cirulli has more than two decades of brokerage and asset-management experience. Before joining CFI’s board, he served as CEO of ActivTrades’ UK business and CEO of Swissquote’s UK operation, formerly MIG Capital, and earlier held a senior role at CMC Markets. He is also CEO of Atlantide Asset Management. CFI cited his experience with regulated financial businesses, international growth, M&A and digital transformation when it appointed him to the board last November.
That November board expansion also brought in former Franklin Templeton portfolio manager David Haglund and Temenos President of Product and COO Prema Varadhan. At the time, CFI said the three additions were intended to strengthen oversight as the group expanded across regions and products. It said it operated under 14 international licences.
The latest change builds on a management restructuring that began in June 2025.
Mansour and Fakhoury had previously served as managing directors. CFI moved them into Chairman and Vice Chairman roles when Melhem was appointed Group CEO, transferring responsibility for day-to-day operations to him while the founders concentrated on board-level strategy and governance.
Just over a year later, the founders are moving another step away from formal leadership titles.
Mansour said the group had been built with the intention of eventually growing beyond its founders. He said he and Fakhoury remained fully invested in CFI’s success and supported Cirulli and the existing management team.
CFI has not announced any changes to ownership alongside the board overhaul, nor has it disclosed plans for an initial public offering, outside investment or another capital-markets transaction.
Governance Changes Follow Rapid International Expansion
The board transition comes during one of CFI’s busiest periods of geographic expansion.
In April, the group secured authorization from Banco Central do Brasil to operate as a locally regulated securities brokerage, giving it access to Brazil’s equities and fixed-income markets. CFI described Brazil as an important part of its Latin American expansion strategy.
The following month, CFI launched operations in Colombia after receiving authorization from the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia to establish a representative office in Bogotá.
CFI has also been adding local leadership elsewhere. On Aug. 18, it appointed François du Plessis as CEO of its South African business as it develops its presence under an FSCA-regulated entity.
Its regulatory footprint already includes entities overseen by authorities in the UK, UAE, Cyprus, Jordan, Lebanon, South Africa, Azerbaijan and Egypt, among other markets.
The expansion has coincided with sharp growth in trading activity.
CFI reported $3.03 trillion of trading volume during the second quarter of 2026, taking first-half volume to $5.34 trillion. Q2 volume was 31% higher than in the first quarter and more than double the level recorded a year earlier. Active clients increased 8.4% year-on-year.
For comparison, CFI reported $6.4 trillion in trading volume for the whole of 2025, up from $3.4 trillion in 2024.
The group had already identified governance and operational scale as priorities for 2026 during a management meeting in Dubai last December, alongside technology and further international growth.
Analysis: CFI Is Separating the Founders From the Chair
The interesting part of the announcement is not Cirulli’s résumé. It is the sequence of governance changes around him.
In June 2025, Mansour and Fakhoury stopped running the company day to day and handed executive authority to Melhem. In November, CFI added three independent directors. Now one of those outside directors has become Chairman, while both founders become ordinary non-executive board members.
Taken together, that looks less like a routine executive appointment and more like the gradual separation of ownership, executive management and board oversight.
For a founder-led brokerage, that can become increasingly useful as the business gets larger.
Every new regulated entity adds its own board requirements, capital rules, compliance functions, auditors and supervisory relationships. Brazil is different from Cyprus; the UK is different from the UAE. Managing those operations through governance arrangements built for a smaller founder-run business eventually becomes cumbersome.
Cirulli also brings something particularly relevant to CFI: he has run regulated brokerage businesses himself.
That matters because an independent chairman who understands retail trading does not need to learn the economics, regulatory pressures or technology requirements of the sector from scratch. His earlier work at ActivTrades, Swissquote and CMC Markets gives him direct experience with businesses similar to the one he is now overseeing.
There is also a capital-markets angle worth watching, but the available evidence does not justify going further yet.
Companies often strengthen independent boards before outside fundraising, a strategic investor, a sale or a future listing. CFI’s rapidly growing volumes, new licences and explicit desire to become more institutional inevitably make those possibilities interesting.
But CFI has announced none of them.
For now, the cleaner interpretation is that its governance is catching up with the scale of the business.
The founders still sit on the board. CFI says they remain invested in its future. Melhem remains CEO. There has been no disclosed ownership change. In practical terms, this is therefore not a founder exit.
What has changed is where formal authority sits.
A year ago, CFI’s founders were still Chairman and Vice Chairman after handing the executive job to Melhem. Now the board itself will be led by someone who joined as an independent director.
That creates a clearer line between the people who built CFI, the executives running it and the board overseeing them.
If CFI continues adding regulated markets at its current pace, that distinction will matter increasingly. And if the group eventually does pursue outside capital or a larger corporate transaction, today’s chairman change may look in retrospect like one of the earlier steps that prepared the company for it.