Mohamed Taymour was in the top 0.1% of high-school students in Egypt the year he graduated. At the time, engineering was the fashionable next step up the educational ladder. So to please his father and gain useful mathematical skills Taymour opted to study industrial engineering instead of of commerce, already his true love.
In 1980 he founded the Egyptian Financial Group (EFG) with two other partners. Then EFG was a small consulting firm with a handful of staff offering advice to Gulf Arabs who were starting to do business in Egypt and needed financial advice and intermediation. EFG-Hermes is now Egypt's largest investment bank, with over 300 staff, and has expanded into asset management, corporate finance and a brokerage firm. It has a market share of over 15% of the Egyptian securities brokerage activities and has developed the country's first equity index.
Taymour's success has lain in his ability to discover what the financial community in Egypt is lacking and then capitalize on it. Ahmed El-Helw, managing director of Intercapital Securities, and previously a senior partner at Hermes, says that Taymour's firm offers stiff competition by striving for better research and a higher quality of service.