Head of Lending, Kenya

Who We Are Moniepoint is Africa's leading business payments and banking platform. We power the dreams of businesses by giving them everything they need to succeed: payments, banking, credit, and business management tools. Having built Nigeria's most reliable business banking infrastructure, we are now entering Kenya, our first market outside Nigeria and our flagship entry into East Africa. Why Kenya Kenya is where our next chapter begins. Following our acquisition of Sumac Microfinance Bank, we're preparing to go live — which means the people we hire here help build a business from its first day, not inherit one. How we execute in Kenya will shape how we approach every market we enter after it, making this one of the most consequential engineering mandates in the business right now. This is the natural extension of our mission: to drive financial inclusion, and help millions of business owners and individuals across the African continent achieve financial happiness and success. About The Role The Head of Lending is a pure business role. You own the commercial strategy, the credit strategy, and the P&L for Moniepoint's lending business in Kenya. You are not a product leader: Product is responsible for building the lending experience and underwriting infrastructure, Data Science builds and tunes the credit models, Risk and Compliance set the risk appetite and regulatory guardrails, and Finance manages funding and capital. Your job is to decide who we lend to, on what terms, at what price, and to run that business profitably, working closely with each of these functions to get there. You report to the Head of Business, Kenya, and you sit within the Business function: you own the commercial health of the lending product, with the added weight of a full P&L and direct accountability for portfolio performance and credit outcomes. The mandate starts with SME lending, the segment with the best fit with Moniepoint's existing merchant base. As the business matures, the scope may extend to other lending products, but your first job is to build a profitable, well-run SME lending business from the ground up. Your responsibilities: Own the lending P&L. You are accountable for the full economics of the lending business: interest and fee revenue, cost of funds, credit losses, and operating costs. You build the budget, the forecast, and the reporting cadence that gives you and the Head of Business clear visibility into portfolio health and profitability. Set the commercial and credit strategy. You decide which SME segments to prioritise, what loan products and terms to offer, and how to price for risk. Pricing and risk tolerance sit with you, but neither is set in isolation: risk thresholds are agreed jointly with Risk and Compliance, and any change in pricing or risk appetite is shared with Product, since it changes what customers experience, and with Growth, since it changes what a segment can expect. Grow a portfolio with healthy unit economics. You are responsible for building the SME lending book from zero into a significant, profitable portfolio, growing disbursement volumes and revenue while keeping default rates and portfolio quality within agreed limits. Drive distribution for lending. You define how lending reaches SME customers, whether through direct sales effort, or partner channels. You work with Growth on which segments to prioritise and how lending fits into the broader customer acquisition motion, without owning segment growth yourself. Partner closely with Product, Data Science, Finance, Risk, and Compliance. You do not own any of these functions, but the lending business cannot run without them. You bring the commercial view to Product's roadmap so the right features get built in the right order. You work with Data Science to define what a good underwriting decision looks like and to keep tightening it. You work with Finance on the cost and availability of lending capital. You work with Risk and Compliance to make sure the business is prudent and compliant with Kenyan lending regulation. Build and lead the commercial lending team. You will hire and manage the people who run the lending business day to day: portfolio and relationship management, credit operations, and collections. Build strategic partnerships. You identify and negotiate relationships with strategic partners who can extend our reach into the SME segment. Who You Are At least 8 years of experience in lending, and lending specifically, not general banking, general commercial leadership, or a broader financial services career with lending as one part of it. You should have spent your career originating, underwriting, pricing, and managing loan portfolios, and be able to speak fluently and specifically about how a lending business actually makes or loses money. Direct, demonstrable ownership of a lending P&L. Not a contribution to one, and not an advisory role around one. You should be able to describe the full economics of a portfolio you ran: revenue, cost of funds, credit losses, and how you managed the trade-off between growth and portfolio quality. A track record of building or meaningfully scaling an SME (or comparable) lending book, ideally in a market with real credit risk challenges and thin credit history data, where good underwriting is a genuine differentiator rather than a solved problem. Comfort operating cross-functionally without owning the functions around you. You will depend daily on Product, Data Science, Risk, Compliance, and Finance, and you need to be effective at shaping their work through influence and a clear commercial point of view, not through authority over their teams. Strong quantitative and analytical ability. You should be genuinely comfortable with the unit economics of lending, portfolio performance metrics, and credit risk concepts, able to interrogate a model's output rather than simply consume it. Exposure to the Kenyan or East African lending market is an advantage but not a requirement. What matters most is that you have built real depth in lending somewhere, and can apply that depth with genuine curiosity to a new and different market. Cultural Alignment Customer Obsession: Build deep empathy for users. Solve problems intuitively, and fix root causes, not just tickets. craft: Master the fundamentals. Reason from first principles, make trade-offs explicit, and raise the bar on quality. Systemisation: Turn repeating decisions into scalable mechanisms. Reduce cognitive load and raise engineering quality. Urgency: Move with disciplined speed. Act autonomously within scope, remove friction, and eliminate risks early. Ownership: Treat the platform as your own. Take initiative across boundaries and follow through without reminders. No Ego: Put the mission first. Share credit, welcome debate, and never protect status over team outcomes. Candour: Surface uncomfortable truths and risks early. Intelligent failure is welcome; concealment is not. Integrity: Stay truthful and ethically consistent. Refuse toxic behavior. Performance without integrity is unacceptable. What we can offer you This is the chance to build a lending business from the ground up in one of Africa's most interesting markets, in a segment, SME credit, that remains genuinely underserved despite Kenya's advanced financial infrastructure. You will have the ownership of a business builder and the backing of a company that has already proven this model at scale in Nigeria. Kenya is next, and lending is one of the clearest wedges we have to win it. What to expect in the hiring process A preliminary phone call with the recruiter. #J-18808-Ljbffr Openkrill