Rima Assi

About Rima

Rima helps create sustainable and competitive economies in the Middle East by transforming public finance. She leads McKinsey’s public-finance work in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, helping to shape the debate and implement prudent fiscal-resource-management and economic-diversification initiatives.

Rima helps decision makers develop engines to stimulate growth and diversify from natural resources. She instills measures that shape sovereign balance sheets (such as making capital-expenditure investments more productive and developing sustainable debt programs) and improve fiscal-cycle management (such as optimizing expenses and increasing nonoil revenues), affecting the lives of over 400 million people in the Middle East and North Africa.

An active advocate of gender diversity, Rima has led McKinsey’s diversity and inclusion efforts in the Middle East for the past ten years. She has transformed the performance-review processes to increase awareness of unconscious biases and strengthened the meritocratic and inclusive environment for colleagues.

Rima is a frequent participant in and speaker at diversity-awareness events. She leads Intimate Dialogues, a series of exclusive discussions on gender parity in the workplace attended by senior women in the public and private sectors.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Rima was a banker working in the risk-control department of a multinational investment bank and financial-services company in France. She is fluent in Arabic, English, and French.