General Manager, Financial Services

Our mission

We're making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...

We’re looking for an experienced manager to lead and grow our Financial services products. Currently, financial services at Wave consists of a customer overdraft and business cash advance product, but we have many additional lending, savings and insurance products on our roadmap. Growing our financial services business is a top priority for Wave and this role reports directly to our CEO.  You will start by managing a Product Manager (who manages a team of engineers and data scientists exclusively working on Financial Services) and a business development team that works on regulatory approvals.  You’ll also work cross functionally with finance, marketing and operations teams to drive the growth and profitability of our financial services products.

As our General Manager of Financial Services, you'll 

• Create and execute plans to grow financial services products across all functions — product, operations, finance & marketing.
• Experiment a lot: we're looking for someone who is curious and passionate about iterating with new lending products and distribution strategies to figure out what works.
• Scale fast: once a pilot works, we want someone that can quickly mobilize the team to scale the product to millions of users.
• Work with the business development teams to get bank partnerships and regulatory approvals needed for new lending products.
• Spend time in Wave markets visiting users and merchants to understand their pain points first hand.
• Come up with growth strategies and campaigns for each lending product.
• Manage a rapidly growing team across multiple markets and continue to build the team out in existing and new markets by attracting the best talent across all functions.
• Establish and manage both business and financial KPIs in close coordination with the CEO.

Key details

• Remote position and can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -7 and +3) with reliable Internet access
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula.
• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country)
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
• Unlimited vacation with a 20-day minimum requirement
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching

Requirements

• At least 10 years of experience in a lending product, operations or financial leadership role at a high growth technology or financial service company or a previous founder of a consumer-focused tech company that did lending
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Ability to collaborate cross functionally with Product Managers, engineers, sales teams and executives.
• Very data driven and laser focused on growing product usage.

You might be a good fit if you

• Build strong relationships and bring out the best in people
• Excel at leadership and enjoy managing diverse teams
• Are metrics oriented and experienced in leading teams towards KPIs
• French language skills are a big plus
• Communicate effectively and often, both in writing and in-person, to the point of over-communication
• Think from first principles about how things should work
• Are excessively detail-oriented and seek to achieve excellence in everything you do
• Are a self-starter and proactive about achieving ambitious targets
• Willing to go the distance to get something done
• Adjust quickly to changing priorities and conditions

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra L