General Manager at Tala (formerly InVenture)

The Role

Tala is looking for an entrepreneurial General Manager to lead the Kenya business and expand Tala’s product to millions of more Kenyans. This role will be responsible for managing the overall health of our business, including the P&L and holistic strategy & execution in-market. You will be responsible for the growth and success of Tala in Kenya. This is one of our most challenging and rewarding roles and requires a diverse set of operational, analytical, community-building, and leadership skills. 

Tala launched its global services in Kenya in 2014 and is one of our largest businesses. This is an incredible opportunity to take an operational and mature business to the next level and help Tala solve one of the world’s largest problems, financial inclusion. Your goal is to lead our team to serve our customers while delivering the highest business value for Tala. 

The ideal candidate is an entrepreneur-at-heart with fantastic communication skills. You are a highly analytical, critical thinker who has an insatiable hunger to solve problems in a fast-paced environment with the ability to think quickly on your feet and manage through ambiguity and adversity of a quickly growing industry.  Additionally, our ideal candidate will have expertise in managing complex businesses and matrixed teams. 

The GM will report to the SVP of Global Business.

What you’ll do

• Responsible for the overall P&L of the market, ensuring we are executing across teams to hit our ambitious customer and financial goals
• Define country strategy and lead a cross-functional business team responsible for customer and financial targets
• Communicate regularly with the US teams and play an influential role on global strategy, challenges, and opportunities
• Lead our in-country Leadership team to identify areas of improvement across teams and drive execution 
• Identify business challenges, propose analytically grounded, well-researched solutions, and drive execution
• Accountable for all marketing efforts in-country to grow user acquisition and build a healthy book of loyal and financially healthy users
• Oversee product strategy in close collaboration with Product Managers and Credit teams
• Accountable for all partner relationships and partner success
• Responsible for escalation of challenges and communication of new developments to the Tala leadership team in Santa Monica, CA 
• Track competition, regulatory changes, and leverage external public relations to ensure Tala is at the forefront of the fintech ecosystem in country
• Hire and lead a high functioning team in-country building an enduring and inspiring culture

What you’ll need

• 7+ years of startup tech, marketing, or business leadership experience in high-performing, direct-to-consumer businesses
• Strong data-driven approach to funnel conversion metrics, campaign performance and P&L management with strong attention to detail.
• Natural ability to work across Credit, Operations, Growth and Leadership teams to propose, persuade, and collaborate with on strategic priorities
• Experience in hiring and managing a team; you work well cross functionally and bring an energetic, fun, and creative approach to the workplace
• Excellent communications skills (written & oral) to communicate complex issues and nuanced considerations clearly

Preferred Skills & Experience

• MBA or related advanced degree
• Deep network of contacts amongst Internet and financial service providers including mobile money operators, banks, mobile payment providers, and e-commerce companies
• Proven bias towards building consumer-centric products and solutions
• Familiarity with tech-enabled credit or payments products and the general fintech landscape
• Experience working in an international tech startup