Head, Partnerships & New Ventures at KCB Bank Kenya

The Position: 

The Head, Partnerships & New Ventures, will report to the Director, DFS, under the Digital Financial Services in KCB Bank Group.

The role is responsible for advocating, developing, and promoting effective collaboration among relevant stakeholders, coordinate the monitoring and evaluation of joint programs undertaken with partners, provide leadership in resource mobilization and onboarding digital solutions to drive the digitalization agenda of the bank leveraging 3rd party partnerships.

Key Responsibilities:

• Engage and socialize the Digital Payments Platform and Gateway to corporates and their respective values chains (distributors, wholesalers, retailers, suppliers) to drive payments, disbursements, savings and trade products.
• Drive for digital payments & merchants’ aggregators to use the bank’s digital payments platforms/gateway/rails by leveraging own or partner solutions to scale the bank ecosystem.
• Engage with startups and fintechs to ensure that the bank’s digital platform is the choice partner for wallet as a service, payments, savings, loan and transfer services.
• Drive interoperability discussions and integrations with financial institutions, Telcos and Saccos to ensure users have a seamless interaction with various platforms through well designed and thought-out customer journeys and use cases.
• Manage the process of contracting, onboarding, integration, deployment and roll out of agreed services for the signed-up partners both internally and externally.
• Design and execute the digital ecosystem and partnerships management framework and strategies to achieve the unit’s commercial and brand objectives.
• Develop and maintain an opportunity assessment framework to guide the identification, promotion and development of new markets, services, or capabilities through partnerships and/or ecosystem engagements.
• Grow utilization of the digital payment capabilities of the bank to public sector, governments and social enterprises by providing relevant solutions, rails and channels infrastructure support.
• Establish digital solution requirements for KCB banked customers to be provided to ring fence the collections and payments.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with teams internally to define priorities, plan joint roadmaps with partners and help solve critical issues across the organization
• Proactively push product thinking and work closely with product and engineering teams, both internally and externally to build the best experiences for users.
• Manage startups and fintechs to deliver capacity, capability and scale for the bank.
• Develop work plans for new and improved capabilities, together with internal and external partners and maintain service levels agreements with relevant functions and third parties. Monitor and review the relevant teams’ Service level agreements (SLA) to ensure compliance.
• Coach, develop and manage the team.

The Person

For the above position, the successful applicant should have the following:

• A Bachelor’s degree preferably in Business Management; Computer Science; Technology or related field.
• Certification in Digital Product Development/ Project Management/ AGILE Methodologies and Practices.
• At least 10 years in managerial experience in leading Partnerships, aggregators, fintech, digital product development and managing teams.
• At least 7 years relevant work experience with specific experience in:
  • Digital Product development and management.
  • Managing corporates, aggregators and digital payments ecosystems.
  • Delivery of mobile financial products and services in a high growth environment.
  • Building relationships, networks & Managing teams.
  • Project Management/Relationship Management.
  • Mobile Money or Payments or Lending Platform Support.
  • Fintech and startup management.