About this Regional Lead role at Wave
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
Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year on year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.
We're hiring a Regional Lead to join our team in Malawi. Reporting to the Country Launcher, the role holder will oversee all Wave agent network acquisition and user growth operations for the assigned region, supervising Field Officers' activities and liaising with the respective agent admin teams to achieve the set targets in the region.
In this role, you'll;
- Agent growth: Coordinate the Field Officers in identifying opportunity areas for new agent locations and acquiring required agents according to the set agent selection criteria and guidelines.
- Agent Contracting: Ensure the Field Officers recruit agents in compliance with the legal and policy requirements as per the defined procedure. Ensure all agents in your region have executed valid contracts and are trained on the contents of the contract before they sign it.
- Agent Activation & Training: Ensure all agents are trained and certified (for all products and procedures). This includes Know Your Customer (KYC) and AML/CTF as per the defined agent training procedure and requirements. It also includes delivering supplies and coordinating outlet branding.
- Agent Ongoing Liquidity Management: Coordinate the cash / e-value availability monitoring at agents in liaison with Liquidity and Agent Quality Territory teams.
- Risk Management and Routine Visitation: Manage the teams in Monitoring Agent vs. target performance through Reports on emerging issues and assessments of the region's performance.
- Agent Churn: Coordinate the Identification of Agents for Closure (as per internal procedure), recover Wave items and equipment, and ensure branding material is removed.
- Distribution Management: Manage a team of Field Officers who, in turn, manage field-based promoters, whose role is to recruit new users to our financial products
- Growth Strategy: Identify and find solutions to critical blockers for user growth and develop strategies to boost the retention of newly acquired users
- Distribution Training and Monitoring: Hire, train, manage, and monitor distribution team members and utilise data to make decisions on distribution strategies
- Be the primary contact person for all agency networks and new users in your region: Execute operational excellence, manage costs, and ensure compliance with internal policies and regulatory guidelines.
- Champion excellent customer service and implementation of quality service delivery standards.
Key Details
- Location: This is a field based role in the assigned region within Malawi
- Work authorization in Malawi is required.
- This is a permanent position.
- Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula.
- We offer generous health insurance for yourself and your dependents.
- We support working parents - we offer 26 weeks of parental leave for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers, in addition to subsidized child care when they return to work.
- Airtime reimbursement.
- Lunch and field facilitation are provided.
Requirements
- Fluency in English and a local language.
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
- At least 5 years of relevant work experience, specifically managing an agent network and/or user acquisition in Malawi, and a minimum of 2 years of experience managing field-based teams.
- Must have worked and overseen agent network activities in the upcountry.
- Prior launch experience is desirable.
You might be a good fit if you
- Have planned and successfully managed customer acquisition strategies for mobile/financial products before.
- Communicate effectively and often, both in writing and in-person, to the point of overcommunication.
- Are detail-oriented and seek to achieve excellence in everything you do.
- Are a self-starter and proactive about achieving ambitious targets.
- Enjoy owning projects - you're autonomous yet know when to escalate problems.
- Willing to go the distance to get something done.
- Adjust quickly to changing priorities and conditions.
- Are tech-savvy: comfortable navigating excel and onboarding to new tools.
- Have a great teamwork spirit.
#LI-MM1
Our team
- We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world.
- We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
- We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
- We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
- We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.
How to apply
Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.
We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.
Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
