Product Manager, Payments Ops – Settlement, Reconciliation & Partner SLA at Watu Credit Limited

Key responsibilities

Settlement performance and recovery

• Define settlement cadence and settlement readiness by partner and market
• Own daily settlement monitoring, delayed payments recovery, and escalation playbooks
• Drive corrective actions with partners and internal teams to reduce recurring settlement failures
• Ensure successful payment booking connects to customer outcomes (eg: reloack timestamp updates etc)

Reconciliation operations and exception closure discipline

• Own reconciliation exception taxonomy, queue workflows, and closure SLAs
• Drive root-cause tagging and prevention backlog governance
• Coordinate with Engineering/Data/Build PM to eliminate recurring exception patterns

Partner SLA governance and operational controls

• Build partner SLA scorecards and run monthly SLA reviews with corrective action plans
• Enforce operating procedures and escalation discipline for underperformance
• Maintain partner operational runbooks, escalation matrices, and evidence pack standards (eg: backend logs, etc) for disputes

Payments incidents and customer impact reduction

• Run the payments incident process: triage, escalation, comms, and postmortems
• Maintain prevention backlog tracking and ensure closure on permanent fixes
• Reduce payment-related customer impact through stronger controls, faster detection, and operational hygiene

Ideal background

• Payments operations experience: settlement, reconciliation, exception management, partner performance governance
• Strong analytical mindset; comfort with operational scorecards and closure discipline
• Comfortable owning operational routines and cross-functional escalation
• Ability to translate operational pain into measurable process and tooling improvements

What we are looking for:

Education level: 

• Bachelor’s degree (Computer science degree preferred) from an accredited institution or equivalent experience with demonstrated proficiency

Experience: 

• Proven experience, 5+ years, in the fintech, telco or equivalent with senior-level engagement and relationship building.
• A minimum of 5 years’ management experience, having worked across technical, commercial, and customer-facing environments within the technology industry - particularly telcos and fintech.
• Demonstrated experience in product management, product marketing, partnership management, business development, or related roles with a track record of successfully establishing strategic alliances.