Jobs at Pesapal

Position Purpose

• Pesapal is seeking a commercially driven Credit Manager to grow our merchant lending book. This is a growth and origination role, not a back-office control role: your job is to convert Pesapal's proprietary transaction data and credit scores into more merchants borrowing, borrowing more, and borrowing again — safely. We already sit on a rich data ecosystem of POS flows, e-commerce volumes, reservation data and digital spend, and a large number of merchants are creditworthy today and simply not borrowing. You will own that gap.
• Importantly, we lend in partnership. Pesapal originates, scores and services merchant credit alongside licensed Digital Credit Providers (DCPs) and banks, who bring the lending licence, the balance sheet, or both. We bring what partners cannot easily replicate: the merchant relationship, the daily transaction data, the credit score built on it, and the distribution. This makes the role dual-sided — you will grow the book on the merchant side and make the partnerships work on the lender side, keeping partner appetite, pricing and limits aligned with the volume of good merchants our data identifies.
• Critically, you will scale the book through the platform, not through headcount. Every lesson you learn in the market — which merchant profiles repay, which signals predict trouble, which limits and tenors get taken up — must end up codified in our digital origination platform as decision rules, eligibility criteria and limit logic. Your success is measured not by how many deals you personally wrote, but by how much of your credit judgement now runs automatically, at volume, without you in the loop. You will not manage Credit Operations, Data Science or Collections; you will work side by side with them and with our lending partners.

Key Responsibilities

Loan Book Growth & Origination

• Own the Growth Number: Carry the disbursement, active borrower and outstanding loan book (OLB) targets for your markets and segments, across all partner lending programmes.
• Build the Origination Engine: Design and run the end-to-end funnel — from identifying eligible merchants in the pre-scored base through offer, application, partner approval and disbursement — and lift conversion at every step.
• Activate the Dormant Base: Systematically work the population of merchants who already qualify but have never drawn down, and diagnose why they don't.
• Drive Repeat & Deepening: Grow repeat borrowing, top-ups, limit utilisation and graduated limit increases, and run pre-approved offers and seasonal working-capital campaigns with Marketing, Product and the relevant partner.
• Enable the Frontline: Equip Sales, Relationship and Merchant Success teams to position credit confidently — talk tracks, eligibility rules, objection handling and referral routes.

Lending Partnerships with DCPs & Banks

• Own the Commercial Relationship: Act as Pesapal's day-to-day counterpart to our lending partners, running the joint pipeline, performance reviews and the working relationship at credit and product level.
• Negotiate & Expand Appetite: Use portfolio evidence to secure larger allocations, higher limits, broader eligibility criteria, better pricing and faster decisioning.
• Keep the Joint Machinery Running: Work with Credit Operations, Finance and the partner on data exchange, decisioning integration, disbursement and repayment flows, reconciliation and revenue share, escalating blockages before they cost volume.
• Report with Credibility: Own the portfolio narrative our partners see — vintage performance, funnel metrics, NPL and recovery trends — so Pesapal is consistently the partner they want to allocate more capital to.

Codifying Credit Learning Into the Platform

• Turn Judgement Into Rules: Translate what you learn originating in the market — merchant behaviour, decline patterns, repayment signals, exception cases — into credit policy expressed as decision rules, eligibility criteria, and limit and pricing logic.
• Own the Credit Strategy in the Decision Engine: Define and continuously refine the cut-offs, scorecard bands, limit-assignment and step-up rules that govern automated decisions, working with Product, Engineering and Data Science to get them built and released.
• Raise Straight-Through Processing: Grow the share of merchants who receive an instant, fully automated decision, and treat every recurring manual exception as the specification for the next platform rule — so volume grows without growing the credit team.
• Commercialise the Score: Work with the Lead Data Scientist to turn model output into commercial decisions — who receives an offer, how large, at what price, over what tenor — and run champion/challenger tests that quantify volume gained against risk taken.
• Close the Feedback Loop: Feed origination intelligence — partner decline reasons, funnel drop-off points, thin-file and underserved segments — back into scoring and policy, and monitor the vintage performance of the cohorts you write.

Credit Assessment, Policy & Collaboration

• Assess & Recommend: Make sound credit decisions within delegated limits, and prepare well-argued cases for exposures above your threshold or requiring partner sign-off.
• Shape Policy With Evidence: Recommend changes to credit policy, limits and eligibility criteria — internally and with partners — supported by portfolio data, knowing when to loosen to capture safe share and when to tighten.
• Respect the Firewalls: Grow the book within the approved risk appetite of Pesapal and each partner, maintaining clear separation between origination, underwriting and collections.
• Work Across Functions: Partner with Credit Operations on clean handover and fast disbursement, Data Science on model design and rollout, Collections on early-warning feedback, and Finance and Compliance on pricing, revenue share, provisioning, Central Bank requirements, data protection and AML/KYC.

Candidate Profile & Experience

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 3–6 years in credit, SME or commercial lending, digital lending or credit analytics, with a clear record of growing a loan book rather than only managing or monitoring one — evidenced by volumes disbursed, borrowers acquired, book grown or conversion improved.
• Partnership Exposure: Experience working across institutional counterparties — banks, DCPs, microfinance institutions, fintech partners or funders — and comfort holding a commercial relationship with a lender rather than simply reporting to one.
• Credit & Systems Fundamentals: Ability to assess an MSME, size a limit sensibly and defend a decision to a partner credit committee, together with experience translating credit policy into the rules, criteria and limit logic that a decision engine or loan origination platform executes.
• Data Fluency: Comfort interrogating dashboards and working with scorecard output, preferably with the ability to write your own SQL queries or build your own analysis in Excel.
• Market Knowledge: Deep familiarity with the Kenyan MSME and merchant ecosystem and how DCPs and banks in this market think about credit. Experience in a digital lender, fintech or a bank's MSME / cash-flow lending unit, and exposure to alternative-data underwriting, is highly desirable.

Key Competencies & Traits

• Commercial Drive With Credit Discipline: You chase growth, but you understand that a book grown badly is worse than no growth at all — and that a partner's trust, once lost, is expensive to rebuild.
• Data-Driven Credit Mindset: You accept that a merchant's daily POS consistency can tell you more than a three-year audited financial statement, and you can prove it to a sceptical bank.
• Influence Without Authority: You get results through peers in Operations, Data Science, Collections and Sales, and through partner institutions, without managing any of them.
• Systems Thinker, Not a Deal Doer: When you solve a credit problem once, your instinct is to make sure the platform solves it every time after that.
• Bias to Experiment: You would rather run a controlled pilot on 200 merchants this month than write a strategy paper about it, and you understand what an MSME actually needs working capital for, and when.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Loan Book Growth: Value disbursed and outstanding loan book against target, across all partner programmes.
• Take-Up & Conversion: Proportion of eligible merchants who accept and draw down, funnel conversion at each stage including partner approval, and growth in active borrowers, repeat borrowing and limit utilisation.
• Partnership Performance: Funding capacity secured and utilised, expansion of partner appetite and eligibility, and successful onboarding of new lending partners.
• Quality of Originated Business: First-payment default and vintage NPL on the cohorts you write, within budgeted and partner-agreed boundaries.
• Automation & Speed: Straight-through processing and automated approval rates, reduction in applications needing manual review, and time from eligibility to disbursement.

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About the role

• As our loan book and product range grow, we need a dedicated owner for the functional side of that platform — someone who knows the system deeply, keeps it configured correctly, and makes sure the business is actually using what it already has.
• This is not a software engineering role. You will not be writing Fineract code. You will be the bridge between our credit, operations, finance and technology teams and the system that runs the loan book: configuring products, resolving issues, building reports, training users, and continuously pushing us toward better use of the platform's capabilities.
• If you enjoy being the person who genuinely understands how a lending system works end to end — and who gets frustrated when a team is doing manually what the system could do automatically — this role is for you.

What you'll do

System configuration and product setup

• Configure and maintain loan products, charges, fees, penalties, interest methods, repayment schedules, moratoriums and grace periods in line with approved product specifications
• Set up and maintain offices, staff hierarchies, roles, permissions and maker-checker controls
• Manage custom fields, data tables, document and notification templates
• Maintain the chart of accounts, accounting rules and financial activity mappings, and work with Finance to keep the general ledger reconciled to the loan portfolio

Day-to-day support and issue resolution

• Act as first and second line support for all Mifos X users across credit, operations, collections and finance
• Triage, diagnose and resolve functional issues; escalate genuine defects and infrastructure problems to Engineering with clear reproduction steps
• Monitor scheduled and close-of-business (COB) batch jobs, investigate failures, and ensure accruals, arrears ageing and interest postings run correctly

Reporting and data

• Build and maintain operational and management reports using the platform's reporting tools and SQL against the Fineract database
• Support portfolio quality reporting — PAR buckets, arrears classification, provisioning inputs, write-offs and restructures
• Provide data extracts and analysis for audit, regulatory and management reporting

Feature adoption and process improvement

• Audit current usage against the platform's full capability set and build a prioritised roadmap of features we should be using but aren't
• Gather requirements from business stakeholders and translate them into configuration changes, or into clear specifications for Engineering where development is required
• Design and run user acceptance testing for configuration changes, upgrades and new releases
• Track the Fineract release cycle and community roadmap, and advise on upgrade timing and impact

Enablement

• Train new and existing users; run refresher sessions when processes or configurations change
• Write and maintain standard operating procedures, user guides and configuration documentation
• Serve as the internal centre of expertise on what the system can and cannot do

What you'll bring

Required

• 4+ years working hands-on with a core banking, loan management or digital lending platform in a functional, business analyst or application support capacity
• Strong practical understanding of the lending lifecycle: origination, appraisal, approval, disbursement, repayment, rescheduling, restructuring, write-off and recovery
• Working knowledge of double-entry accounting as it applies to a loan book — accruals, provisioning, income recognition, GL reconciliation
• Proficiency in SQL, including writing queries against a relational database (Fineract runs on MySQL/MariaDB) for reporting and investigation
• Demonstrated business analysis skills: requirements gathering, process documentation, writing UAT scripts, managing stakeholders across functions
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and genuine patience for training non-technical users

Strongly preferred

• Direct hands-on experience with Mifos X or Apache Fineract
• Experience with comparable platforms — Musoni, Oradian, Loan Performer, Craft Silicon Bankers Realm, Mambu, Temenos, Finacle or similar — will be considered a strong substitute
• Familiarity with REST APIs and tools such as Postman; comfort reading JSON payloads to diagnose integration issues
• Exposure to mobile money integrations (M-Pesa or equivalent) in a lending context
• Experience with report authoring tools used in the Mifos ecosystem, such as Pentaho
• Understanding of regulatory reporting requirements for lenders in Kenya or the wider East African market
• Basic Linux command-line comfort and experience working alongside engineering teams in an agile environment