Intelligent Ops & Governance Lead

Must have technical / professional qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Operations Management, Risk Management, Engineering, or a related field; Master’s degree (MBA or equivalent) is an advantage.
  
• Minimum 10–12 years’ experience in financial services, fintech operations, payments, or regulated digital environments, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership role.
  
• Proven experience leading end-to-end operational governance within complex, highly regulated environments.
  
• Strong understanding of regulatory frameworks applicable to digital financial services, including compliance, fraud prevention, and operational risk management.
  
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and implementing risk and control frameworks across multi-product portfolios.
  
• Experience establishing service level governance, resilience standards, and business continuity frameworks at scale.
  
• Strong operational excellence background with experience in lean process optimization and continuous improvement methodologies.
  
• Proven ability to enable agile ways of working while maintaining defined compliance thresholds and escalation protocols.
  
• Experience managing ecosystem partners and third-party operational risk within platform-based business models.
  
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capability with experience using performance data to drive operational decisions and improvements.
  
• Demonstrated leadership capability in building high-performing teams within matrixed, cross-functional organizations.
  
• Excellent stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with the ability to balance innovation and governance in strategic decision-making.
  

• Lead end-to-end fintech operational processes across payments, credit, merchant, wallet, lending, and ecosystem products.
  
• Build an intelligent operations engine leveraging AI, analytics, and automation — including AI-driven anomaly detection for compliance and fraud risks in real time, and automated SLA monitoring with alert systems.
  
• Oversee customer experience operations, ensuring seamless, secure, and compliant customer journeys.
  
• Establish service excellence standards, SLAs, and operational KPIs across FS products and channels.
  

End-to-End Fintech Operational Enablement

• Oversee end-to-end fintech operational integrity across payments, credit, savings, insurance, and ecosystem services.
  
• Define operational readiness standards for new product launches and ecosystem integrations.
  
• Continuously assess operational bottlenecks and implement structured improvements; enable seamless coordination between Product, Growth, API, Loyalty, and Operations teams.
  

Regulatory & Operational Compliance

• Define compliance thresholds and operational guardrails that enable innovation within defined regulatory boundaries, without unnecessary bureaucracy.
  
• Ensure adherence to local regulatory requirements across all fintech offerings; implement structured compliance monitoring and reporting frameworks using real-time compliance dashboards where possible.
  
• Provide advisory support to squads on operating within defined compliance boundaries; partner with Legal and Risk to monitor evolving regulatory expectations.
  

Fintech Risk & Controls Management

• Establish risk management frameworks across fraud, operational risk, and ecosystem risk; define risk appetite thresholds in collaboration with Risk and Executive leadership.
  
• Implement preventative and detective control mechanisms — including AI-powered fraud detection — across fintech operations.
  
• Monitor fraud trends and operational risk exposures across segments; ensure timely escalation of material risks within defined protocols.
  

Service Level Governance & Customer Experience

• Define and monitor SLAs across fintech customer journeys; ensure operational performance standards are met across digital and assisted channels.
  
• Track service disruptions and coordinate rapid remediation actions; deploy automated SLA monitoring and alert systems.
  
• Embed customer experience feedback loops into operational improvement cycles; align service standards with brand and regulatory expectations.
  

Partner & Ecosystem Governance

• Define onboarding, due diligence, and governance standards for fintech ecosystem partners.
  
• Monitor partner performance against contractual and service commitments; trigger escalation frameworks for ecosystem performance risks.
  
• Ensure partner integrations comply with regulatory and operational thresholds; enable ecosystem growth within clearly defined guardrails.
  

Business Continuity & Operational Resilience

• Develop and maintain business continuity plans across fintech services; conduct resilience testing and scenario planning for operational disruptions.
  
• Ensure disaster recovery protocols meet regulatory and internal standards; coordinate cross-functional response to major operational incidents.
  
• Monitor resilience KPIs and system recovery timelines; strengthen operational preparedness as scale and complexity increase.
  

Continuous Improvement & Lean Optimisation

• Embed continuous improvement loops across fintech operational domains — data-led identification of inefficiencies and friction points.
  
• Champion automated reconciliation, intelligent workflow tools, and process re-engineering to raise operational intelligence and reduce manual intervention.
  
• Track operational cost efficiency improvements; facilitate structured retrospectives following major launches or incidents.
  

Leadership & Talent Development

• Build and lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary team by embedding OKR-driven accountability, agile ways of working, and a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
  
• Ensure succession readiness for all critical roles within the function through structured coaching, mentoring, and capability development programmes.
  
• Champion cross-functional collaboration across M-PESA to ensure integrated, outcome-led delivery of products and initiatives.
  
• Model ethical leadership — reinforcing integrity, transparency, and responsible innovation in all decisions — and ensure governance and compliance in all initiatives.
  

Agile Leadership & Delivery Governance

• Lead empowered cross-functional squads aligned to shared OKRs, with clearly defined decision rights, accountability structures, and escalation protocols.
  
• Champion iterative delivery and hypothesis-driven experimentation, balancing execution speed with regulatory, risk, and operational guardrails.
  
• Enable transparent progress tracking through sprint reviews and performance rituals, fostering a culture of ownership and outcome-based performance.
  

Key performance indicators:

Availability & Reliability

• Fintech platform availability: maintain 99.95%+ availability across all customer-facing platforms; measured monthly.
  
• SLA compliance: achieve 95%+ SLA compliance across all key fintech customer touchpoints.
  

Regulatory & Risk

• Regulatory compliance: zero critical regulatory findings per annual audit cycle; all medium-risk findings remediated within 60 days of identification.
  
• Operational and fraud loss rate: maintain below 5% of fintech revenue; report monthly.
  

Resilience & Recovery

• Business continuity test success rate: achieve 100% pass rate on all scheduled DR tests; resolve any failures within 30 days.
  
• Operational incident resolution: achieve 95%+ of incidents resolved within defined recovery time objectives (RTO).
  

Partner & Ecosystem Governance

• Partner SLA adherence: maintain 95%+ partner SLA adherence; trigger escalation protocol for any partner below 90% for two consecutive months.
  

Efficiency & Continuous Improvement

• Operational cost-to-serve ratio: reduce by 5% year-on-year across fintech services.
  
• Process cycle time reduction: reduce average cycle time for priority customer and operational journeys by 50% within 12 months
  
• Continuous improvement impact: deliver 5 measurable improvement initiatives per quarter with quantified efficiency or resilience gains