M-Pesa Africa: Senior Manager-Finance Operations at Safaricom Kenya

DESCRIPTION

We are pleased to announce the subject career opportunity within Finance (M-Pesa Africa) reporting to the Finance Director.

About M-Pesa Africa

M-Pesa, is a pioneering fintech business and global market leader in mobile money. From starting in 2007 as a convenient means by which the unbanked and underbanked can make digital payments, M-Pesa has now grown to offer >50 million active customers financial services, enterprise, merchant, and retail solutions. We are proud of our work in enabling the digital economy in our markets, and in driving financial inclusion.

We are currently organized into an Agile Organization working in various release trains (Business Payment, Digital, Financial Services, and Global Payments.

Our culture values: Customer Focused; Innovation; Experiment & Be bold; Teamwork.

Role Description

• To ensure the smooth and efficient running of the organization by providing leadership and guidance into all key operational matters for the Finance department
• This includes operational oversight on financial systems, procurement, and tax
• Ownership of the statutory reporting & audit process and key liaison with external and internal auditors
• Enforcing proper financial controls & compliance with IFRS reporting
• Ensuring timely and proactive closure of internal and external audit issues while supporting the robust implementation of a combined assurance process
• Embracing agile way of working and moving to funding value streams over projects in line with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Digitization of key processes

Key Responsibilities

• Improve operational systems, processes, and policies specifically, information flow and management
• Align current financial processes to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Key liaison for all shared service support
• Oversee financial management, planning, systems, and controls
• Effective cash flow planning and treasury management
• Provide financial oversight for procurement to pay process
• Tax compliance and review oversight
• Oversee Procurement

Key performance indicators

• Timely review and submission of statutory accounts
• Timely closure and implementation of all external and internal audit issues
• Effective enforcement of controls and annual review of combined assurance framework
• Effectively and timely treasury management
• Digitization of key finance processes
• The demonstrable impact of the improvements in cost, efficiency, talent development, and management
• Implement and address matters raised from the Employee Survey to align and bring up the Spirit of MPA behaviors

Core competencies, knowledge, and experience

Business Competencies

Influencer and effective communicator

• Consciously takes steps to make the most of every conversation/interaction
• Identifies people’s needs, interests, and motives to be able to influence the decisions they make
• Communicates simply to excite and engage people
• Pro-actively adapts own style and approach to build rapport, and work with others more effectively
• Builds and maintains strong relationships and networks

Operational Excellence

• Targets effort and resources on high-value, high impact activity  
• Focuses on achieving maximum performance and driving continuous improvement
• Thinks about processes and problems cross-functionally and end-to-end
• Uses knowledge of products, technology, process, systems, and policy to solve problems
• Leverages Participatory Budgeting techniques to understand how funding should be allocated across value streams

Creativity and Innovation

• Finds creative ways to exploit opportunities and solve problems
• Takes risks and pushes what is possible
• Experiments with unorthodox approaches that are aligned with agile principles
• Encourage the Lean Start-up cycle and initial investments into minimum viable products that can test value assumption prior to full investment

Business Know-how

• Uses data and research to make decisions that are competitively and financially robust
• Balances current and future needs through investment guardrails
• Thinks and acts like an owner of the business 
• Acts in line with legal, regulatory, professional, and ethical standards

Working with Change

• Responds flexibly to changing situations
• Manages the business and people aspects of change to drive performance

Agile Programme Management

• Defines scope and deliverables in agile terms including a clear business benefit hypothesis
• Schedules activity and identifies resource needs, dependencies, and synergies in line with Program Increment delivery cadence
• Evaluates progress mitigates risks, and addresses issues

Functional Competencies

Financial Management

• Be responsible for Accounting policy and governance
• Cashflow management and liquidity
• Develop and maintain all fundraising and accounting systems and procedures
• Prepare draft audit accounts and be a liaison with the externally appointed auditor
• Oversee day to day processing of accounts
• Liaise with Tax advisors on key tax matters
• Manage bank accounts to ensure sufficient liquidity
• Ensure accounting requests are resolved and communicated in a timely manner with all key stakeholders

Procurement Operations Support

• Review Tender board documents
• Provide financial oversights to the procurement team
• Apply Agile Contracting in line with SAFe framework recommendations

Tax Operations Support

• Ensure timely payment and filing of tax returns
• Ensure annual tax health check

Systems Operations support

• Ensure all key financial processes and correctly mapped within the ERP system
• Ensure consolidated reporting can run effectively off the system

Risk Management

• Oversee insurance policies
• Contribute to review of the risk register
• Implements effective financial controls and processes

Accounting

• Prepare, analyses and summarises financial data to support business operations and deliver statutory information
• Able to handle consolidated accounts preparation & review

Reporting

• Deliver timely and accurate reports to satisfy statutory and business requirements 
• Identifies key performance and variances, and provides recommendations

Shared Services

• Efficiently leverage the finance structure to work on an outsourced support services model

Governance

• Preparation of documents for board
• Monitor and enforce adherence to Delegation of authority

QUALIFICATIONS

Apply if you have:

• Relevant Degree in Accounting, Economics, Finance. Masters in a similar area will be an added advantage.
• CPA (K) or equivalent or post-graduate qualification is a must.
• At least 5-7 years broad experience in all facets of Finance i.e., Management Accounting, Forecasting and Planning, Financial Accounting, and Audit.
• Specialist in more than two areas of finance e.g., Statutory Accounting, Tax, Insurance, and IFRS reporting.
• Demonstrated agility in learning, working with cross-functional teams and multiple stakeholders at all levels in the organization.
• Good stakeholder management experience
• Agile, Innovative, pragmatic, commercial, and customer-focused approach
• Experience with executive-level reporting and influence (trusted advisor to the business)

We are happy if you have:

• Knowledge of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

What you can expect from us:

• We believe in a fair and robust interview process
• We have a robust flexible total reward scheme
• Dedicated support and mentoring/coaching
• Opportunity to develop and progress – plus a solid dedication to work-life integration. It all means you’ll have everything you need to advance your career and achieve your full potential.