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In August 2022, Amar Akhtar stepped off a train in Cardiff with £3,600 in his pocket, £28,000 of debt, and nowhere to live. Nobody would rent him a room.

A few years later, he's leading Final Rentals — a company valued at £14 million, operating across 65+ countries and 200+ locations, with a 28-person team spread across 12 countries. Revenue has grown 15-fold in three years. Final Rentals became the only Welsh company on the Sifted 100, and Amar was named Fintech Leader of the Year at the Fintech Awards Wales.

But this isn't really a story about car rental or awards. It's about what happens when an outsider keeps building.

In this episode, Amar speaks with Emyr Afan about:

🇵🇰 Growing up in Pakistan as the eldest of seven siblings

💻 Discovering he could code at a young age — and reading 2,000 lines of code in 10 minutes

🌍 Moving to Dubai at 19 and stumbling into the car rental industry

☁️ Telling a sheikh his servers would become obsolete — and being right

🇵🇱 Living in Poland as the only brown person in the room

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳 Why Cardiff felt like home — and became his launchpad

🚗 Building the world's first car rental company that doesn't own a single car

📈 Scaling through COVID instead of shutting down

💰 Why he's building a "zebra," not a unicorn

🤝 The 50/50 gender balance in his leadership team

📛 Why a top branding agency told him the name "Final Rentals" would fail — and why he kept it anyway

Guest: Amar Akhtar, Founder & CEO of Final Rentals

Host: Emyr Afan

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⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

01:50 – Welcome, Amar

02:00 – The Fintech Awards and a growing trophy cabinet

04:30 – Arriving in Cardiff with nothing

08:40 – The meaning of the name "Amar"

10:30 – Being the eldest of seven

13:30 – Faith, Zakat, and wealth as responsibility

16:30 – Creating wealth vs. worshiping wealth

18:30 – Bringing Amazon mentality to car rental

20:30 – Coding in nine languages: a gift from God

24:30 – Engineering, MBA, and compulsive problem-solving

27:30 – Leaving Pakistan for Dubai

31:30 – Finding car rental by accident

33:30 – Telling a sheikh the cloud would make his servers obsolete

38:30 – Building cloud systems and the origins of Final Rentals

41:30 – Poland: the only brown person in the room

45:00 – Outsider as competitive advantage

47:00 – Building a 50/50 gender-balanced team

49:00 – Starting Final Rentals with AED 15,000

52:30 – Democratizing car rental for independent operators

56:00 – The founder as first salesperson

59:00 – Cardiff, Fintech Wales, and the angels who backed him

1:01:30 – Surviving COVID and building proprietary AI

1:05:30 – What AI really means for business

1:08:30 – Amar's maverick moment: coming to Cardiff

1:11:00 – The no-deposit revolution

1:13:00 – Aled Miles Global Impact Award

1:15:30 – What Wales gets right and wrong for entrepreneurs

1:23:00 – The Sifted 100: the only Welsh company

1:25:00 – Building a zebra, not a unicorn

1:28:00 – Studying Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and Ford

1:32:00 – Leading a distributed team across 12 countries

1:35:00 – The story behind the name "Final Rentals"

1:38:30 – Launching in Pakistan from Cardiff

1:41:00 – Maverick Maxims: rapid-fire round

1:47:30 – Best and worst decisions

1:51:00 – "Welcome home, son. We'll make it big."

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