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Risk and Compliance Head Job at MFS Africa

MFS Africa is the leading digital payments platform in Africa, enabling low-cost payments across the continent. The company works in close partnership with mobile network operators and financial institutions to bring simple and relevant payment services to African consumers and businesses. MFS Africa connects over 320 million mobile money users across Africa through its platform, which enables cross-border payment for mobile money networks, banks, money transfer operators, and large corporates.


As a fintech company, we strive towards elegance and simplicity in everything we do. Our mission is to make borders matter less, and our values are to simplify, care, and be revolutionary. We pride ourselves on world-class operations and a distributed team. Our offices include Abidjan, Accra, Johannesburg, Kampala, Lagos, London, Nairobi, and Port-Louis, and many employees work remotely from locations where we do not have offices. We are regulated by the FSC in Mauritius, BoG in Ghana, BoT in Tanzania, and FCA in the UK.

The MFS Africa team has doubled in the past year and continues to grow rapidly. Our people are talented, curious, and the reason our company does exceptional things. Excellence in nurturing our people and their passions is foundational to our success as a business.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Position: Risk and Compliance Head 

Job Location: Lagos
Job Type: Full-time
Department: Risk & Compliance

The Role

  • A seasoned Risk professional who will lead and grow our risk function to provide smart, effective, and adapted risk guidance and oversight, regulatory horizon scanning and risk management across the MFS Africa entities in Nigeria (the “Nigeria entities”).

Duties and Responsibilities
Risk Management:

  • Leading the Risk function for the Nigeria Entities (aligning with the Group Risk function)
  • Implementing an enterprise risk management framework for the Nigeria Entities, covering all aspects of current and future business activities and in line with the Group Risk Management Framework
  • Monitoring the effectiveness of the enterprise risk management and operational risk frameworks to ensure alignment with strategy, policies and procedures;
  • Providing ongoing guidance and oversight to the Nigeria Entities and the Group on Enterprise and Operational Risks, including risk event monitoring and tracking;
  • Building and maintaining an Operational Risk management framework, including designing a relevant/proportionate risk management framework for the Nigeria Entities
  • Drafting and rolling out risk management policies and procedure documents
  • Implementing and overseeing the Risk Control Self Assessments (RCSA) methodology for MFS Africa Group, which includes ensuring that risk processes (risk assessment, identification, management, reporting & optimisation) are implemented across all the business unit levels
  • Reviewing and reporting on investigated operational loss incidents
  • Ensuring current and future risks are addressed by the business, including credit, foreign exchange, operational, compliance & anti-Money laundering, personal data, cyber and information security, reputational, and other risks as they become relevant;
  • Reporting to Executive management and the Board of Directors on key risks and management thereof as part of the governance framework;
  • Ensuring relevant risk management documentation and reports, used to identify and track delivery against key risks, mitigating actions, relevant risk themes, trends and emerging risks, are developed for business functions
  • Ensuring that a risk profile is created for every function that consists of Key risk indicators, Internal and external loss data, key issues control logs, and the relevant risk and control matrices.
  • Liaising with the internal and external audit by providing relevant and up-to-date risk matrices and follow-up on audit findings
  • Facilitating review of risk appetite statements for the Nigeria Entities to ensure they remain appropriate and recommend changes where this may be required
  • Compiling and maintaining the Company’s risk register/incident risk log
  • Compiling and maintaining the Company’s fraud log
  • Responisbility for tracking, maintenance and renewal of the insurance policies for the Nigeria Entities together with Group Finance
  • Tracking Insurance cases and liaising with Insurance companies in settlement of insurance claims.

Data Protection Officer:

  • Performing assessments (privacy impact, legitimate interests, vendors, etc.) and improve assessment processes
  • Respond to ad-hoc queries on data protection matters by internal and external stakeholders

Business Continuity Management:

  • Design and implement company-wide Business Continuity Management awareness and education program
  • Design and implement a company-wide Business Continuity Management plan 
  • Notwithstanding the Employee’s appointment to the Position as set out, it is recorded that the Company is a dynamic organisation in which duties and responsibilities require adjustment to meet the operational needs of the business.
  • Therefore, it might be necessary to request the Employee from time to time to perform such necessary duties and responsibilities as dictated by the Company’s operational needs.
  • The Employee undertakes not to unreasonably refuse to perform duties and responsibilities that she does not perform ordinarily.

Why work for us

  • We are the cutting edge of fintech in
  • We are highly innovative and were ranked by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in the world
  • Attractive package including flexible benefits and competitive remuneration,
  • Massive growth potential
  • We operate a flexible remote working and unlimited leave
  • We solve relevant problems for Africa and the world and are building the MFS Africa into a payment infrastructure designed to transcend generations.
  • We have a very diverse work environment with over 30+ nationalities represented and continually strive to build a culture of caring and execution.