NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Mostafa Hassanin (Mosti) is the Group CISO/CSO of SMG Swiss Marketplace Group, where he leads security, trust, and safety for Switzerland’s leading digital marketplaces, spanning over 15 brands across four verticals: Automotive, General Marketplaces, Real Estate, and Finance & Insurance. They serve millions of users across Switzerland. His work reflects a modern, practical, and outcome-driven approach to security leadership, focused on automation, resilience, trust, and people and culture.

Mosti built and scaled the security function of the group following SMG’s joint venture, aligning cybersecurity tightly with business strategy and defined risk appetite with stakeholders. His philosophy is simple and consistent: expect attacks, be prepared, and focus on resilience. It’s about intelligence and visibility. This mindset shaped a security program to continuously reduce risk while enabling growth. The maturity of this approach was demonstrated as he with his team demonstrated resiliance through a successful IPO in September 2025.

A key differentiator of Mosti’s leadership has been the introduction of adaptive, risk-based security to combat bots, crawlers, and fraud at scale. SMG was among the first European marketplaces (and the first at its scale) to introduce Passkeys for consumer platforms. Combined with adaptive MFA and contextual risk scoring, this significantly reduced identity-related fraud while preserving a seamless user experience.

Under his leadership, SMG transitioned from a complex post-merger environment to a simplified zero-trust architecture. Vendors were reduced by more than 50%, legacy systems were decreased, and security controls were consolidated to improve efficiency and effectiveness. AI-driven security controls were introduced to address alert fatigue, enabling autonomous baselining and response, saving hundreds of person-hours each month. In 2025, centralized SIEM and SOAR capabilities automated over 80% of response actions and reduced cloud risk exposure significantly. He believes there’s no finish line for security, we simply keep improving.
These initiatives delivered tangible results. Despite rising cybercrime across Switzerland, reported fraud on SMG platforms declined sharply by up to 85% in key marketplaces, demonstrating real-world protection for users and the digital economy.

Security culture is promoted creatively through SMG’s annual Cybersecurity Month, a company-wide festival combining activities, simulations, games, and hands-on learning. As part of this effort, SMG introduced McGuard, a security character to communicate cybersecurity in an accessible and engaging way.

Mosti fosters an inclusive and no-blame environment, invests heavily in learning, and promotes security as a shared responsibility across the organization (among all levels), ensuring that technology, process, and culture evolve together to sustain long-term resilience.