Job Purpose:

To drive strategic growth, profitability, and innovation across the bank’s card portfolio by leveraging deep payments expertise, customer analytics, emerging technologies, and ecosystem partnerships. 

The role will proactively shape the bank’s future in digital payments, ensuring differentiated value propositions, superior portfolio performance, and readiness for next-generation payment trends.

Key Responsibilities:

Portfolio Performance & P&L Management:

• Own end-to-end performance of issuing portfolio: debit, credit, prepaid and premium segments.
• Set and deliver annual acquisition, activation, usage, spend, and revenue targets.
• Continuously optimize pricing, interchange strategies, FX markup revenue, and product profitability models.
• Identify under-performing segments and lead corrective actions.

Customer Lifecycle & Engagement Management:

• Develop curated lifecycle strategies – onboarding, activation, usage, cross-sell, dormancy, retention.
• Drive personalization using data/AI insights to maximize cardholder value.
• Lead top-spender programs, loyalty initiatives, and premium experiences to enhance engagement.

Product Innovation & Future-Ready Solutions:

• Scan global payment trends, emerging rails, ISO 20022 opportunities, tokenization, embedded finance, CBDCs, and real-time payments.
• Champion the introduction of future-facing products (contactless, virtual cards, tokenized solutions, wearables, card-on-file optimization, biometric cards, cross-border innovation).
• Develop use cases for AI in portfolio management (risk scoring, propensity models, offers optimization).
• Evaluate fintech partnerships and ecosystem expansions.

Risk & Compliance Management:

• Ensure credit risk, fraud risk, operational risk and regulatory compliance across the portfolio.
• Recommend policy changes for limits, exposure, velocity controls, and authorization strategies (including friendly-fraud mitigation).
• Lead interventions for cross-border fraud trends, merchant fraud, first-party abuse, and chargebacks.

Stakeholder & Partner Management:

• Collaborate closely with Business, Digital, Credit, Marketing, Operations, Fraud, and CX teams.
• Lead business cases for new partnerships, alliances, loyalty platforms, and co-branded card opportunities.

Operational Excellence & Process Digitization:

• Drive digital onboarding, instant issuance, Straight-Through Processing (STP) and workflow automation.
• Work with Technology & Ops to map and resolve customer pain points end-to-end.
• Improve authorization rates, chargeback turnaround, and disputes experience.

Academic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in business, Finance, IT, Economics, or related field.
• Postgraduate qualification is an added advantage (MBA preferred).

Work Experience:

• 8–10+ years in card issuing, digital payments, portfolio or product management in a bank or fintech.
• Proven experience managing a card P&L and driving spend, revenue, and customer engagement.
• Strong exposure to credit card portfolio management and risk management.
• Experience working with international card schemes and payment processors.
• Demonstrated track record of leading digital transformation or payments innovation initiatives.

Key Competencies:
Payments Innovation & Emerging Tech:
Deep curiosity and understanding of:

• Tokenization, invisible payments.
• Real-time payments, ISO 20022, Open Banking APIs.
• AI in credit scoring and behavioral analytics.
• Digital identity, biometrics, cybersecurity.
• CBDCs, blockchain use cases.
• Embedded finance and marketplace payments.

Strategic Foresight & Market Intelligence:

• Ability to anticipate future payment models and translate them into business opportunities.
• Strong scenario-planning and trend-mapping capabilities.
• Ability to assess the long-term viability of technologies and fintech partnerships.

Data-Driven Portfolio Optimization:
Hands-on skills in using analytics for:

• Propensity modelling.
• Usage segmentation.
• Fraud anomaly detection.
• Customer lifetime value (CLTV) maximization.
• Spend behavior clustering.
• Understands how to embed data science in business decisioning.

Design Thinking & Customer-First Innovation:

• Ability to reimagine end-to-end customer journeys.
• Strong capability to convert customer pain points into digital product enhancements.
• Experience shaping value propositions for mass, affluent, SME and corporate customers.

Core Skills:

• Strong leadership and influence skills.
• High analytical capability and strategic thinking.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management and presentation skills.
• Creativity and ability to drive innovation.
• Strong project management and execution discipline.
• Customer-centric mindset and problem-solving orientation.

If you believe you meet the above requirements log onto our www.imbankgroup.com/ke and click on careers and apply for the position. Your application should reach us as soon as possible but not later than 9th December 2025.