Credit penetration among retail individuals in most African countries is low given the poor penetration of credit bureaus and evolving maturity of alternate data to build credit footprints for borrowers. Furaha is addressing this by building a microlending platform that enables ‘purpose-driven’ loans to mass market customers across Africa, starting with Uganda as its first market. Furaha combines market-leading technology with a responsible lending approach, aiming to be a force for good to the individuals and communities it addresses.
Furaha is backed by SC Ventures (SCV), the innovation unit of Standard Chartered Bank.
Who We Are Looking For
The Chief Technology Officers for Furaha owns and shapes the overall technology strategy, roadmap, prioritisation and delivery of KPIs in continuous alignment with the business vision. The CTO is a hands-on technology leader with engineering experience in Reactjs, Next.js, Restful API micro-services, NestJS, Nodejs, python, AI engines (eg TensorFlow) and NLP (eg AWS Comprehend), blockchain and RWA tokenisation technologies. CTO owns the design, build and production operation of a multi-market platform that supports the Furaha business. The CTO will be focused on taking into production the technology stack, product roadmap, engineering team, and solution delivery for the platform.
This role can be based in Kenya or UAE as indicated in the job title. Please apply to the specific job advertisement based on your preferred location.
Key Responsibilities
Business Strategy and Technology roadmap
- Working with venture leads and Furaha Financial management to set the business agenda of the venture
- Working with Furaha Financial Venture Leads , Product Owners, and partners to lead technology build, evaluate technology trade-offs, oversee vendor engineering engagements, and deliver features and capabilities aligned to the business model to build on the minimum viable product (MVP) to successful global rollout.
- Chief Technology Officer will discuss with partners, fintechs, co-creation clients, and business to expand the offering Engram.
- Co-ordinate, question and interrogate technology opportunities with engineering team and innovate to sustain a competitive advantage.
- Employ a managerial mindset that seeks to optimise the business outcome for the Venture while establishing sound governance, internal process, adherence to policies and processes. This role requires close coordination with the SC Ventures CTO.
- Thought leadership and demonstratable subject matter expertise on use of machine learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), APIs, Data Analytics, cyber security, DevSecOps and similar technology applications.
- Establish sound technology operation covering incident management, problem management, service levels (SLAs) and business continuity processes
- Support and adapts the realisation of benefits and business value to maximise benefits and identify new unforeseen benefits within the venture
- Provide advice to business stakeholders to manage requirements, interpretation of Regulatory Requirements, best practices in the market and manage change/deployments within the triple constraint of scope, time and cost.
Technology Delivery and Management
- Have expertise and professional experience in software development and deep understanding of technology delivery.
- Experience in operating within Agile delivery processes to minimise time to market and maximise the client value of technology delivery.
- Participate in assessing and hiring technical personnel required to be part of Furaha Financial, and support the growth in aggressive go-to-market.
- Build and manage a team of developers, architects, and other technical experts, and provide mentorship and guidance to team members
- Engage with relevant Risk Officers to develop a mature IT delivery organization aligned with Technology and Information and Cyber Security (ICS) expectations
- Advantageous to have experience in ITIL and ISO27001.
- Oversees accurate financials. Ensuring Financials up to date including Project static data, status update including RAG status, key milestones, financials, risks, dependencies, issues and resource forecasts, and they are tracked & reported to the FURAHA Venture management.
People and Talent
- Attract, employ, and retain high quality people such that Technology team is skilled and experienced to deliver the best experience for our customers, build a fully Agile development organisation in-line with the business strategy.
- Ensure the Technology is adequately resourced and staffed by an appropriate number of competent staff, sufficiently independent to perform duties objectively and to support sustainable business growth
- Lead by example and build the appropriate culture and values.
- Exemplify key values of client obsession, fairness, diversity and inclusion.
- Create a motivational and challenging environment in the team which is conducive to creativity and delivery of the strategy.
- Manage performance, wellbeing, and engagement by creating a culture of achievement and satisfaction.
- Role model the company values and behaviours, consistently promoting and reinforcing them.
- Conduct regular 1 to 1s and annual performance & development reviews to ensure a high level of performance and continuous coaching and feedback.
Governance and Risk Management
- Expertise with governance structures and mandatory processes.
- Proactive in seeking regular assurance that the areas of responsibility and teams are performing to an acceptable risk and control standard.
- Act quickly and decisively when any risk and control weakness become apparent and ensure they are addressed within an appropriate timeframe and escalated through the relevant committees.
- Balance business performance delivery and cost management constraints with risk and control matters to ensure that they do not materially threaten the Venture’s ability to remain within risk appetite.
- Ensure a full understanding of the risk and control environment in area of responsibility.
- Facilitate risk management activities with respective stakeholders on the potential impact of
- Technology/Process/Operational Obsolescence.
- Support both Internal and External Technology Audits – identify issues, create action and issue closure plans and track to closure.
- Provide advice to relevant stakeholders on compliance with Group standards relating to AML/Sanctions/Frauds/ Compliance
- Processes for which the role is responsible under the ORF as 1st line; for executing / completing, and Supervising.
- Act and escalate quickly when any risk and control weakness become apparent and ensure they are addressed within an appropriate timeframe and escalated through the relevant committees.
- Collaborate with other companies, industry consortia, and regulatory bodies to advance the development, adoption, and interoperability of technology, specifically blockchain.
- Work with multiple stakeholders to establish applicable risk / control framework to ensure that the Group’s ability to remain within risk appetite is not materially threatened.
Technical Skills and Subject Matter Expertise
- 15 years of relevant experience in technology roles in banking, payments, or similar sectors.
- Expert knowledge of mainstream cloud provider eg AWS and firebase, Cloud-native services, and elastic infrastructure.
- Expert background in Javascript orTypescript technology stack, NodeJS, Next.js and NestJS, distributed systems, authentication mechanisms, asynchronous event processing, message queues, and architecture patterns.
- Knowledgeable on modern object orientated programming practises including entity frameworks, dynamic reflection, and reusable interfaces.
- Expert Knowledge with 3rd party system integrations via APIs ie HTTP or REST
- Familiar with OWASP, secure by design, secure coding practises, code scanning, unit testing, dependency management (deprecation, vulnerabilities, licensing)
- Expert Knowledge with DevOps, Infrastructure-as-Code including continuous integration, delivery, deployment and assurance.
- Experience in front-end React and JavaScript or Typescript presentation frameworks
- Expert Knowledge with operating highly-available production financial systems
Skills and characteristics
- Imaginative and creative approach to how we do work. Curiosity about new technologies, workflows, and products.
- You enjoy working independently and are able to take informative decisions independently. You enjoy mentoring and teaching others to create a world class cohesive team
- Energy and desire to succeed; follows through on commitments; pushes self and others to deliver exceptional results.
- Ability to work across cultures and backgrounds is a must. Seeing things from multiple perspectives and being easy to work with.
- Ability to see things from multiple perspectives, as well as ask the question “why” continuously
- Tireless work ethic and enthusiasm to execute and get things done.
- Knowledge of the organization’s industry group, trends, directions, major issues, regulatory considerations, and trendsetters; ability to apply this knowledge appropriately to diverse situations.
- Ability to understand geographically dispersed and highly varied customer and segment base.
- Understanding of effective communication concepts, tools and techniques; ability to effectively transmit, receive, and accurately interpret ideas, information, and needs through the application of appropriate communication behaviours.
