Deputy Group Director, Operations – Intelligent Financial Services

Job Summary:

To serve as the operational backbone and second-in-command across Kifiya’s Intelligent Financial Services (IFS) business units, providing day-to-day leadership and cross-functional alignment across Revenue Assurance, Bank Partnerships, Credit Operations, and NPL Analytics. This role ensures that operational discipline, risk performance, financial health, and partner satisfaction are consistently delivered across platforms, while enabling IFS to scale responsibly, profitably, and with resilience.

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Execution & Operational Alignment

• Translate IFS’s multi-product strategy into integrated operational plans and execution frameworks across all business units.
• Lead day-to-day operational oversight, ensuring that product, partner, credit, and support functions work in sync to deliver revenue, efficiency, and reliability.
• Serve as a strategic partner to the Group Director, identifying execution risks and driving cross-unit problem-solving.

2. Revenue Assurance & Financial Integrity

• Oversee revenue lifecycle operations across IF-aaS, Embedded Finance, Device Financing, Invoice Financing and eCommerce platforms.
• Ensure accurate reconciliation, leakage detection, partner settlement, and fee tracking per platform and contract.
• Collaborate with Finance to implement real-time dashboards and audit-grade visibility into revenue operations.

3. Credit Operations & Underwriting Execution

• Manage credit operations across partner banks and products, ensuring adherence to disbursement policies, approval workflows, and transaction integrity.
• Coordinate credit servicing and data workflows from origination through repayment, ensuring operational excellence across every lending touchpoint.
• Lead the rollout of new credit operations systems, SOPs, and automations in collaboration with tech and risk teams.

4. NPL Monitoring & Early Warning Systems

• Supervise the analytics and control function that monitors repayment trends, delinquency patterns, and portfolio health.
• Partner with Risk and IDD teams to continuously refine segmentation models, risk-tier strategies, and behavioral scoring for proactive NPL management.
• Lead ops-driven interventions (policy tuning, partner targeting, communication flows) to reduce delinquencies and improve recoveries.

5. Bank Partnerships & SLA Execution

• Coordinate operational delivery across partner banks, ensuring adherence to service-level agreements (SLAs), data sharing, joint processes, and operational handshakes.
• Support business units and growth teams in resolving bank-side bottlenecks and onboarding roadblocks.
• Maintain a cross-bank partner performance dashboard and issue-resolution tracking process.

6. Operational Risk & Process Governance

• Institute and enforce SOPs, quality controls, fraud mitigation mechanisms, and field accountability across operational functions.
• Monitor system integrity, fraud triggers, user behavior anomalies, and partner escalations, ensuring appropriate internal coordination.
• Lead post-incident reviews and preventive actions for major operational breakdowns (e.g. downtimes, disbursement errors, partner escalations).

7. Leadership & Organizational Design

• Directly lead managers across the four core operational domains: Revenue Assurance, Bank Partnerships, Credit Operations, and NPL Analytics.
• Set structured OKRs, delivery scorecards, and quarterly execution reviews.
• Foster a high-performance, mission-aligned culture with strong ownership and accountability across teams.

8. Reporting & Continuous Optimization

• Deliver unified reporting to IFS leadership on operational KPIs: revenue, credit quality, SLA status, exception handling, and partner satisfaction.
• Implement feedback loops between operations, product, analytics, and support to improve platform design, process automation, and frontline execution.
• Identify and lead initiatives to improve process speed, data quality, and unit cost efficiency across the IFS stack.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in business, Finance, Economics, or Engineering; MBA or advanced training in financial services or operations preferred.

Experience:

• 12+ years in operations, execution leadership, or platform delivery in fintech, digital banking, or telco financial services.
• Experience directly overseeing credit operations, collections/NPL management, or revenue assurance preferred.
• Proven success in scaling operations within a fast-paced, multi-stakeholder, digital financial services environment.

Skills:

• Strong analytical mindset with comfort in performance data, dashboards, and root-cause analysis.
• Deep understanding of lending workflows, credit risk processes, and operational risk management.
• Ability to manage and develop multi-disciplinary teams and drive execution across verticals.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills for high-stakes internal and external coordination.