Portfolio Manager

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...

How you’ll help us achieve it

We’re looking for an experienced portfolio manager with excellent analytical skills to help us grow our Financial Services products, inclusive of consumer and merchant lending, savings and insurance. Many of these products are new to market, and you will play a key role in evaluating performance and identifying growth opportunities. For our lending products, you will be a creative thinker developing iterative credit risk frameworks enabling Wave to responsibly provide funding to our customers.

In this role, you'll;

• Work to maximize the growth and profitability of Wave’s consumer and merchant Financial Service products across our markets
• Deeply understand customer usage and behavior towards the product suite, to generate insights which can be actioned into growth opportunities, across the customer lifecycle from acquisition to retention.
• Turn insight into action by experimenting and testing and rapidly scaling successful pilots, in partnership with product, marketing and growth team
• Create frameworks to track and monitor key performance indicators and identify trends that impact on business performance
• For the lending portfolio, ensure we optimize our approach both underwriting (who to lend to) and line assignment (how much to lend)
• Rigorously deep dive into performance of each lending product, against a full KPI scorecard - driving root analysis of what is working well, and what needs to be optimized
• Identify relevant data sources to support risk modeling, in markets where traditional sources such as credit risk bureaus are often limited
• Develop collections and recovery strategies
• Monitor and track market and macroeconomic trends

Key details

• This is a remote position and can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable Internet access.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula
• Major benefits:
  • 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

• 8+ years of experience in lending in a portfolio management, credit risk or commercial management position, in a financial services or fintech company
• Experience in other financial products such as savings, insurance or payments is a strong advantage
• Excellent data analysis and interpretation skills
• Have a proven ability to create, implement and monitor credit risk strategies