Francophone Banking Regional Manager - West Africa

Context Of The Role:

As Regional Manager for Banking Partnerships, you will be part of a high-performance team that is responsible for activating and managing Ezra’s banking relationships across key Francophone West African markets including Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia. You will lead commercial and operational coordination with banking partners, from deal-close to go-live and into scaling, ensuring strategic alignment, partner satisfaction, and strong portfolio performance.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own Ezra’s banking-partner relationships end-to-end, serving as the primary contact across executive and operational stakeholders.
• Secure bank funding to launch and scale new markets.
• Identify, negotiate and establish high-impact banking partnerships that align with the company’s goals.
• Track and analyze key partnership metrics, providing insights and recommendations to optimize results
• Drive activation of new partner products and markets: align cross-functional teams, manage timelines, and own delivery to launch.
• Oversee post-go-live portfolio monitoring and ensure KPI performance across disbursements, repayments, and risk.
• Coordinate internal stakeholders (legal, compliance, tech, operations, analytics, marketing) to deliver on partner expectations and commercial goals.
• Provide timely insights on regulatory developments, economic conditions, or market shifts that may impact performance or expansion.
• Build long-term trust with partners by ensuring smooth execution and transparent communication.
• Stay informed of industry trends, emerging banking technologies and competitive landscapes to identify new opportunities.
• Drive partnership-driven revenue by identifying and executing commercial opportunities with banking institutions

Qualifications And Experience:

• Business-level fluency in both French and English (spoken and written).
• Minimum 5 years' experience in banking, fintech, or telecoms. An MBA is an added advantage.
• Proven track record of project management, ideally leading cross-functional teams from inception to go-live.
• Experience managing commercial relationships with financial institutions or telcos.
• Strong understanding of digital lending, mobile money, and financial product performance metrics.
• Ability to travel across West African markets as needed.

The ideal candidate is someone who:

• Can manage complex relationships at both executive and operational levels.
• Builds deep, trusted partnerships through credibility and respect.
• Demonstrates strong commercial acumen, articulating Ezra’s strategy and translating it into actionable plans.
• Exercises sound judgment - balancing trade-offs and making decisions aligned with Ezra’s business model.
• Is highly resourceful and execution-focused, asking the right questions, leading decisively, and navigating ambiguity.
• Shows high emotional intelligence and exceptional communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills.
• Thrives under pressure, breaking down complex challenges, prioritizing effectively, and delivering in fast-paced, changing environments.
• Is deeply relationship-driven and commercially astute.
• Is structured, detail-oriented, and delivery-focused.
• Communicates confidently with executive presence.
• Is resilient, proactive, and solution-oriented.
• Comfortably operates in ambiguous and fast-paced environments.

About Ezra:

Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE. 

Our flagship products are Advance Credit Service (ACS), Nano and BNPL. 

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit. 
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand. 
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services 

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing. 

Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure. 

But it doesn’t end there. We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.