Airtel Money Product Lead - Card Business

Position Overview:

• As a Product Lead within our Mobile Money division and reporting to the Group Head of Products and Partnerships, you will play a crucial role in the development, delivery, implementation, and maintenance of Airtel Money payment ecosystems related to Cards issuing & acquiring. This will involve overseeing the end-to-end process, from card issuance to merchant acquiring, ensuring innovation, compliance, and optimal performance.

Key Responsibilities

The Role Holder’s duties will include but not limited to:

Developing and implementing a comprehensive card issuing and acquiring strategy aligned with Airtel Money’s overall goals.

• Develop and implement a comprehensive strategy for card issuing and acquiring services, aligning with the company's overall goals.
• Enable Airtel Money users to access technology to make payments anywhere in the world including, Digital Wallets, Virtual Cards, Tap to Pay.
• Drive Innovation on new open loop payment capabilities and value-added services.
• Grow the penetration of Airtel Money card use case within the customer base, focusing on cross border e-commerce payments.
• Review existing processes and procedures, customer journeys and channels to improve merchant and customer experience and develop tactical plans to stimulate increased usage.
• Plan and coordinate the implementation of business plans and penetration of new opportunities.

Driving superior commercial results and financial returns.

• Ensure monitoring and delivery of all financial targets including revenue margins and cost optimization.
• Analyze data and performance metrics to make informed decisions, drive improvements, and maximize revenue.
• Grow Airtel Money’s revenues, transactions share, customer market share and margins in card issuance and merchants acquiring and any other relevant products to achieve Airtel Money’s ambitious growth for both formal and informal merchants.
• Support the team’s market research and competitive positioning analysis together with cross-functional stakeholders including marketing and product development teams.
• Analyze market trends, technology trends in mobile financial services planning.

Driving the development and enhancement of issuing and acquiring card infrastructure.

• Optimize card programs for user experience, security, and efficiency.
• To design, develop and implement secure business functions on cards applications as per existing software development standards.
• Review and re-engineer architecture of Cards systems, technical models.
• Ensure availability of card products across all channels such as the Merchant/consumer App, USSD, portal, Open APIs, and others across all the 14 markets
• Support to define use cases for the OPCOs, product design and product requirements for customization to meet specific card customer and merchant needs and liaise with the technical team to ensure correct implementation.
• Provide market feedback to Airtel leadership regarding competitive offerings, prospect needs and generate product development ideas.

Forge strategic partnerships.

• Manage strategic partnerships with key merchants, payment, and technology companies across the world.
• Manage relationships with card networks, processors, BIN sponsor and other key partners in the card issuing and acquiring ecosystem.
• Ensure compliance with relevant regulations and industry standards for card issuing and acquiring.
• Maintain relationships with schemes, vendors, and regulatory organizations for all cards and payments industry related matters as well as delivery.
• Prospect and acquire potential key merchants as strategic Airtel Money partners to help drive adoption.
• Identify new partnership opportunities and develop proposals outlining how a partnership could benefit both parties

Team and stakeholder engagement

• Lead and drive engagement with the multi-level, cross-functional stakeholders to justify prioritization and roadmap delivery for merchant solutions.
• Independently represent Airtel Money at industry events, including round tables, speaking forums and new business events.
• Provide required product reports as input to the Airtel money weekly, monthly report, including roadmaps and performance against target dates.
• Support to undertake talent and performance management of the Airtel Money business development team.