Intelligent Ops & Governance Lead at Safaricom
Job Description
Job Summary
The Intelligent Ops & Governance Lead is accountable for enabling safe, resilient, and scalable end-to-end fintech operations across M-PESA’s Financial Services portfolio. The role serves as the operational backbone of the cluster — ensuring policy clarity, process excellence, regulatory compliance, and risk discipline while actively enabling innovation and growth.
A defining feature of this role is its governance boundary: Product owns commercial decisions; Operations owns compliance thresholds, operational guardrails, and risk frameworks that allow Product, Growth, Loyalty, and API teams to execute confidently within defined boundaries. The Lead uses AI, automation, and data to build an intelligent operations engine — one that is predictive, not merely reactive — ensuring fintech solutions operate with high reliability, strong fraud and risk controls, and consistent service standards across all customer touchpoints.
The Intelligent Ops & Governance Lead oversees end-to-end fintech operational integrity, including policy and process management, partner and ecosystem governance, regulatory and operational compliance, risk and control frameworks, service level governance, business continuity planning, and customer experience enablement. The role ensures that fintech solutions operate with high reliability, strong fraud and risk controls, and consistent service standards across all customer touchpoints. Anchored in regulatory clarity and operational resilience, the role institutionalizes structured compliance governance while avoiding bureaucratic friction. It embeds lean process optimization and continuous improvement loops to reduce operational complexity, improve turnaround times, and enhance customer experience outcomes.
The Intelligent Ops & Governance Lead also ensures that operational risk, fraud management, and control frameworks are forward-looking and proportionate to scale, supporting innovation without compromising trust. Through disciplined service level governance and ecosystem partner oversight, the role strengthens platform stability, operational performance, and regulatory confidence. Operating within agile ways of working, the role enables cross-functional squads by providing clear compliance thresholds, defined decision rights, and escalation protocols. It champions iterative improvement while balancing speed with regulatory and operational safeguards.
Key Duties & Responsibilities
Intelligent Operations Leadership
- Lead end-to-end fintech operational processes across payments, credit, merchant, wallet, lending, and ecosystem products.
- Build an intelligent operations engine leveraging AI, analytics, and automation — including AI-driven anomaly detection for compliance and fraud risks in real time, and automated SLA monitoring with alert systems.
- Oversee customer experience operations, ensuring seamless, secure, and compliant customer journeys.
- Establish service excellence standards, SLAs, and operational KPIs across FS products and channels.
End-to-End Fintech Operational Enablement
- Oversee end-to-end fintech operational integrity across payments, credit, savings, insurance, and ecosystem services.
- Define operational readiness standards for new product launches and ecosystem integrations.
- Continuously assess operational bottlenecks and implement structured improvements; enable seamless coordination between Product, Growth, API, Loyalty, and Operations teams.
Regulatory & Operational Compliance
- Define compliance thresholds and operational guardrails that enable innovation within defined regulatory boundaries, without unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Ensure adherence to local regulatory requirements across all fintech offerings; implement structured compliance monitoring and reporting frameworks using real-time compliance dashboards where possible.
- Provide advisory support to squads on operating within defined compliance boundaries; partner with Legal and Risk to monitor evolving regulatory expectations.
Fintech Risk & Controls Management
- Establish risk management frameworks across fraud, operational risk, and ecosystem risk; define risk appetite thresholds in collaboration with Risk and Executive leadership.
- Implement preventative and detective control mechanisms — including AI-powered fraud detection — across fintech operations.
- Monitor fraud trends and operational risk exposures across segments; ensure timely escalation of material risks within defined protocols.
Service Level Governance & Customer Experience
- Define and monitor SLAs across fintech customer journeys; ensure operational performance standards are met across digital and assisted channels.
- Track service disruptions and coordinate rapid remediation actions; deploy automated SLA monitoring and alert systems.
- Embed customer experience feedback loops into operational improvement cycles; align service standards with brand and regulatory expectations.
Partner & Ecosystem Governance
- Define onboarding, due diligence, and governance standards for fintech ecosystem partners.
- Monitor partner performance against contractual and service commitments; trigger escalation frameworks for ecosystem performance risks.
- Ensure partner integrations comply with regulatory and operational thresholds; enable ecosystem growth within clearly defined guardrails.
Business Continuity & Operational Resilience
- Develop and maintain business continuity plans across fintech services; conduct resilience testing and scenario planning for operational disruptions.
- Ensure disaster recovery protocols meet regulatory and internal standards; coordinate cross-functional response to major operational incidents.
- Monitor resilience KPIs and system recovery timelines; strengthen operational preparedness as scale and complexity increase.
Continuous Improvement & Lean Optimisation
- Embed continuous improvement loops across fintech operational domains — data-led identification of inefficiencies and friction points.
- Champion automated reconciliation, intelligent workflow tools, and process re-engineering to raise operational intelligence and reduce manual intervention.
- Track operational cost efficiency improvements; facilitate structured retrospectives following major launches or incidents.
Leadership & Talent Development
- Build and lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary team by embedding OKR-driven accountability, agile ways of working, and a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
- Ensure succession readiness for all critical roles within the function through structured coaching, mentoring, and capability development programmes.
- Champion cross-functional collaboration across M-PESA to ensure integrated, outcome-led delivery of products and initiatives.
- Model ethical leadership — reinforcing integrity, transparency, and responsible innovation in all decisions — and ensure governance and compliance in all initiatives.
Agile Leadership & Delivery Governance
- Lead empowered cross-functional squads aligned to shared OKRs, with clearly defined decision rights, accountability structures, and escalation protocols.
- Champion iterative delivery and hypothesis-driven experimentation, balancing execution speed with regulatory, risk, and operational guardrails.
- Enable transparent progress tracking through sprint reviews and performance rituals, fostering a culture of ownership and outcome-based performance.
Educational Qualifications, Experience, & Skills Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Operations Management, Risk Management, Engineering, or a related field; Master’s degree (MBA or equivalent) is an advantage.
- Minimum 10–12 years’ experience in financial services, fintech operations, payments, or regulated digital environments, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership role.
- Proven experience leading end-to-end operational governance within complex, highly regulated environments.
- Strong understanding of regulatory frameworks applicable to digital financial services, including compliance, fraud prevention, and operational risk management.
- Demonstrated expertise in designing and implementing risk and control frameworks across multi-product portfolios.
- Experience establishing service level governance, resilience standards, and business continuity frameworks at scale.
- Strong operational excellence background with experience in lean process optimization and continuous improvement methodologies.
- Proven ability to enable agile ways of working while maintaining defined compliance thresholds and escalation protocols.
- Experience managing ecosystem partners and third-party operational risk within platform-based business models.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capability with experience using performance data to drive operational decisions and improvements.
- Demonstrated leadership capability in building high-performing teams within matrixed, cross-functional organizations.
- Excellent stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with the ability to balance innovation and governance in strategic decision-making.
