Job Description
Reporting to the CoE Lead, Legal Services the Senior Manager Financial Services - Legal & Regulatory will serve as the lead Legal, Regulatory, and Policy Affairs Business Partner for the Financial Services Cluster and Public Sector Digital Transformation CoE, delivering strategic legal guidance and regulatory advocacy that drives business growth while ensuring compliance and mitigating risk. This role will act as the primary liaison with financial services and fintech policy and regulatory authorities, leading advocacy initiatives and securing favourable regulatory outcomes. It will provide specialized legal expertise, including contractual drafting, negotiation, review, legal research, and legislative monitoring, to enable the objectives of the Financial Services and Public Sector Digital Transformation teams.
The Senior Manager Financial Services - Legal & Regulatory will proactively deliver timely policy and regulatory support to ensure full compliance, manage regulatory risks, and anticipate emerging financial services and fintech developments. Additionally, the role will serve as custodian of critical compliance records, such as registers of financial/fintech licenses, regulatory fines and sanctions, and calendars of regulatory inspections, while offering expert legal, regulatory, and policy support to other business units as required.
Responsibilities
- Uphold the company code of conduct, policies and procedures, ensuring integrity and accountability in every aspect of your work
- All employees have a responsibility to adhere to safety, health, and wellbeing policies, guidelines and procedures in all actions and decisions.
Regulatory Engagement and Advocacy
- Lead proactive engagement with financial services and fintech regulators to influence policy and legislative frameworks in favor of business objectives.
- Represent Safaricom in regulatory forums, consultations, and policy formulation processes, ensuring Safaricom’s positions are clearly articulated and adopted.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with regulatory authorities to mitigate adverse actions and secure favorable outcomes.
- Legal Advisory, Risk Management & Dispute Resolution
- Provide strategic legal counsel on complex commercial, financial services, and public sector digital transformation matters.
- Embed privacy-by-design and compliance-by-design principles into product development and lifecycle management.
- Identify, assess, and mitigate regulatory and legal risks across financial services operations, ensuring full compliance with applicable laws and standards.
- Manage and resolve disputes arising from financial services operations, ensuring minimal operational and financial impact.
- Oversee litigation processes and provide timely updates to leadership on contentious and potentially contentious matters.
- Contractual Management & Negotiation
- Draft, review, and negotiate high-value partnership agreements and complex commercial contracts for financial services and public sector initiatives.
- Ensure all agreements safeguard organizational interests while remaining commercially viable and aligned with evolving product features and regulatory requirements.
- Maintain and update customer-facing templates (e.g., consumer T&Cs, agent agreements, B2C/C2B contracts) to reflect regulatory and business changes.
Policy and Legislative Monitoring & Compliance
- Conduct continuous legislative and regulatory watch to anticipate emerging trends impacting financial services and fintech.
- Prepare concise briefs and strategic recommendations for leadership on regulatory developments and their implications.
- Actively contribute to internal and external stakeholder sessions on key legislative issues such as AML, electronic financial services, and digital public infrastructure.
- Serve as custodian of critical compliance records, including registers of licenses, regulatory fines/sanctions, and inspection calendars.
- Ensure timely and accurate reporting to internal stakeholders and regulators, including monthly and ad hoc compliance reports.
- Drive adherence to internal governance frameworks and external regulatory obligations.
Stakeholder & Team Management
- Partner with cross-functional teams (Finance, Risk, Public Sector Digital Transformation, Vodafone/Vodacom counterparts) to align legal and regulatory strategies with business objectives.
- Support joint initiatives and maintain strong collaboration on global compliance matters, trademarks, managed service agreements, and international money transfer agreements.
- Provide clear strategic direction to legal and regulatory support teams aligned with organizational priorities for Financial Services and Public Sector Digital Transformation.
- Set performance expectations and ensure accountability for delivery of high-quality legal and compliance outcomes.
- Mentor and coach junior legal professionals to build expertise in financial services law, fintech regulation, and policy advocacy.
- Foster a culture of collaboration within the Legal Services CoE and across business units.
Core competencies, knowledge and experience
Customer Obsession
- Deepen team connection to our customers and communities.
- Foster authentic relationships with customers and partners that build trust.
- Explicitly take customer-centric decisions and take personal ownership to achieve results.
- Simplify processes through digitalisation and promote a digital mindset and digital first customer experience.
- Stay focused on the big priorities, know when to make meaningful trade-offs and demonstrate brilliant execution.
Purpose
- Create an inspiring vision for your team to drive strategy and performance.
- Show ambition and courage, empowering others to go beyond the plan.
- Bold and challenge teams to reimagine how things are done.
- Prompt new thinking and ideas by asking “what if” questions.
- Use knowledge of the external environment (customers, partners, competition, external bodies) to identify and act on opportunities for growth at pace.
Innovation
- Create psychological safety so everyone can have an impact.
- Fuel innovative ideas from others and test them to enable growth.
- Explore successes and failures with curiosity and resilience; fearlessly recognizing lessons learned.
- Share your ongoing learning and personal purpose with others.
- Learn fast from digital adoption, using learnings to drive simplicity, scale and efficiency.
Collaboration
- Articulate your team’s role in making our strategy happen, prioritizing and aligning resources with current and future needs.
- Actively collaborate to break silos and hold your team accountable to do the same.
- Develop others to make the most of their talents and coach them to take ownership to get things done.
- Create an inclusive environment ensuring the safety and wellbeing of others.
- Live our Purpose and demonstrate the highest standard of integrity.
Qualifications
- At least ten (10) years’ knowledge and progressive experience in commercial law within Financial Services, Telecommunications sectors of which three (3) should have been in a senior leadership role.
- Proven track record in regulatory engagement and advocacy with financial services regulators, drafting and negotiating complex commercial agreements & managing litigation and dispute resolution for financial services matters.
- Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) from a reputable Commonwealth University.
- Completion of the Kenya School of Law Diploma and admission as an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya.
- Member in good standing of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) and compliant with all professional requirements.
- Relevant professional certification (e.g., Arbitration/Mediation & Negotiation Skills; Fintech and Financial Services Regulation; Anti-Money Laundering (AML); Intellectual Property (IP); Legislative Processes/Drafting)
- Master’s Degree in Law (LL.M) from a recognized institution is an added advantage.
- Possess high professional and ethical standards.
- Be a strategic thinker with an analytical mind.
go to method of application »
Job Description
Reporting to the Chapter Lead, Money Laundering Reporting Office, the position holder has the responsibility to ensure adherence to the organization’s anti money laundering (AML), counter terrorist financing (CTF) and Counter Proliferation Financing controls. The person will also ensure that M-PESA services and any qualifying service are offered in compliance with provisions of the Proceeds of Crime & Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2009.
Responsibilities
Key accountabilities and decision ownership
- Uphold the company code of conduct, policies and procedures, ensuring integrity and accountability in every aspect of your work.
- All employees have a responsibility to adhere to safety, health, and wellbeing policies, guidelines and procedures in all actions and decisions
Other Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain an effective monitoring and analytical function in regard to Safaricom products and services.
- Ensure that the subscriber network is compliant with applicable legislation governing subscriber registration.
- Ensure that agent, staff and supplier due diligence is in compliance with the AML Regulations
- Ensure the business has the appropriate level of controls to meet AML, CTF and CPF group policies as well as local and international regulatory AML requirements.
- Maintain a detailed knowledge of current AML regulations, legislation requirements, as well as future developments within the AML, CTF and CPF space and update Safaricom’s internal AML policies and procedures as appropriate.
- Develop and maintain effective customer onboarding due diligence program, watch list screening, transaction monitoring, training and suspicious activity reporting programs.
- Develop and correlate insights on current and emerging AML, CTF and CPF trends and derive critical information to aid in decision making and performance benchmarks for AML, CTF and CPF controls.
- Support in the development and optimization of AML, CTF and CPF rules and models in response to current and emerging fraud trends.
- Support integration and optimization of AML, CTF and CPF automations with business systems, and required data feeds aimed at improving detection ability and control environment.
- Collaborate with the various squads towards implementing short to medium term AML, CTF and CPF controls.
- Active participation in AML, CTF and CPF reviews and other AML, CTF and CPF monitoring initiatives.
Analysis and Audit
- Practice and collaborate on Risk assessments for products and services with internal stakeholders.
- Continuous assessment and evaluation of AML/CFT/CPF control suitability.
- Build and maintain relationships with internal and external stakeholders required for supporting execution of the tasks to manage AML/CFT/CPF risks.
Reviews and Investigation
- Customer onbaording, sanction screening, transaction monitoring reviews and invetigations to identify suspicious activities/transactions.
- Articulate required AML/CFT/CPF controls to be inbuilt in products and services.
Data Analytics
- Work closely with Data Science teams towards delivery of AML/CFT/CPF detection models.
- Provide insights on customer pain areas to address gaps in Product design, processes that impact customer experience.
- Develop insights on current and emerging AML/CFT/CPF trends and risk areas into actionable use cases.
- Active participation in all AML/CFT/CPF monitoring activities.
- Track and analyze frontline metrics for Demand
- Support front line teams with required insights on demand and collaborate on first time resolution of demand.
Automation, Reporting and Tooling
- Develop and maintain integrated reports within the function to capture well defined performance metrics for KYC reviews, AML/KYC alerts rules, AI models and Demand Management.
- Develop insights from KYC, Sanctions/PEP Screening and Transaction monitoring reviews to drive use cases for automation and controls refresh.
Training and Awareness
- Maintain an effective AML training program across the operational functions that deals with services and products that are in scope of applicable legislation and Safaricom services.
Core competencies, knowledge and experience:
Customer Obsession
- Deepen team connection to our customers and communities.
- Foster authentic relationships with customers and partners that build trust.
- Explicitly take customer-centric decisions and take personal ownership to achieve results.
- Simplify processes through digitalisation and promote a digital mindset and digital first customer experience.
- Stay focused on the big priorities, know when to make meaningful trade-offs and demonstrate brilliant execution.
Purpose
- Create an inspiring vision for your team to drive strategy and performance.
- Show ambition and courage, empowering others to go beyond the plan.
- Bold and challenge teams to reimagine how things are done.
- Prompt new thinking and ideas by asking “what if” questions.
- Use knowledge of the external environment (customers, partners, competition, external bodies) to identify and act on opportunities for growth at pace.
Innovation
- Create psychological safety so everyone can have an impact.
- Fuel innovative ideas from others and test them to enable growth.
- Explore successes and failures with curiosity and resilience; fearlessly recognizing lessons learned.
- Share your ongoing learning and personal purpose with others.
- Learn fast from digital adoption, using learnings to drive simplicity, scale and efficiency.
Collaboration
- Articulate your team’s role in making our strategy happen, prioritizing and aligning resources with current and future needs.
- Actively collaborate to break silos and hold your team accountable to do the same.
- Develop others to make the most of their talents and coach them to take ownership to get things done.
- Create an inclusive environment ensuring the safety and wellbeing of others.
- Live our Purpose and demonstrate the highest Standard of integrity.
Qualifications
Must have technical / professional qualifications
- Relevant Degree in Business, Engineering or IT Undergraduate Degree or relevant field along with professional qualifications.
- Good knowledge of payment services and operations.
- Knowledge of money laundering techniques and regulations.
- Professional certification in AI, Data Science, AML/CFT/CPF Examination.
- Competencies in software development/ data extraction technologies and platforms e.g. {C#, Java, Python, C, C++, Objective C, Flutter, Oracle, MySql, Sql Server,Nosql Databases,Virtualization Using Docker, Linux and Windows Administration, ETL, Soap/Restful Web Services, USSD, SMPP, Cloud Computing using AWS/Azure}.
- Understanding of Agile Methodology, Machine learning, Bot development, Penetration Testing, QA, Project Management, Micro services, SANs security compliance, and Technical documentation.
- At least 3 years as a software engineer/developer or data science experience.
- Proficiency in data analysis and trend profiling using big data technologies such as Apache Hadoop,Apache spark, or Power BI.
- Ability to work in complex environments and multiple projects simultaneously with strict deadlines to deliver on commitments.
- Highly developed interpersonal and communication skills.
- Possess high professional and ethical standards.
Gmail
Yahoomail