Safaricom House, Kenya
Job Description
Reporting to the Director – Digifarm. Digifarm’s Financial Products Lead plays a critical role in designing, developing, and managing financial products tailored to the agricultural sector. This role is focused on bridging the gap between agriculture and fintech, creating innovative solutions that help farmers, agribusinesses, and other stakeholders in the agriculture value chain access better financial services.
Given the unique needs of the agricultural sector (e.g., seasonality, weather risks, unpredictable cash flow), the Agriculture Financial Products Lead will work to create and optimize products that are both feasible and beneficial for this audience.
The Financial Products Manager will be responsible for the end-to-end success of Digifarm’s Financial Products, with a key focus on credit.
He/She will have a deep understanding of the customer problems, develop agri-fintech solutions, and manage the end-to-end product roadmap and strategy.
He/She will collaborate on credit scoring and risk mitigation, and work with technology and commercial teams to deploy the solution. He/She will also onboard and manage partnerships with financial institutions, while adhering to regulatory requirements and risk management standards.
Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities
Market Research and Competitive Analysis
- Conducting research to understand the specific needs of farmers, agribusinesses, and other stakeholders in the agricultural value chain.
- Identifying gaps in existing financial services and exploring new opportunities in the fintech space to address those needs.
Product Strategy and Development
- Create financial products (such as loans, savings, or investment products) specifically tailored for the agricultural industry. These products must account for unique factors such as crop cycles, weather risks, and cash flow irregularities.
- Determine customers’ needs through user insights and research. Ensuring that the agricultural financial products meet the needs of the end-users by designing products that are easy to access, use, and understand.
- Document financial product constructs, with detailed requirements, term sheets, commercials etc.
- Develop and manage product roadmaps to ensure financial product prioritization, and lead iterative product development cycles to continuously incorporate customer feedback.
- Collaborate with technology teams to ensure on-time delivery and high-quality product releases.
- Provide thought leadership throughout various stages of product lifecycle – planning, design, specification, implementation and launch.
Business and Commercial Strategy
- Define product policies, positioning and pricing strategies.
- Develop key KPIs to measure product performance.
- Collaborate with finance teams to develop business cases, and ensure commercially viable products.
- Collaborate with operational, commercial and marketing teams to develop go-to-market and product scaling plans with a focus on building trust in fintech solutions among farmers, SMEs and rural communities.
Product Partnerships
- Build relationships with financial institutions and onboard them as partners for the products.
- Engage with finance, risk, credit and legal teams to ensure alignment on the products and execute on the partnership.
- Manage these financial institution partnerships and stakeholder engagements to ensure successful scaling of the products.
Credit Scoring and Risk Mitigation
- Work closely with data science teams to implement advanced risk models for credit scoring tailored to farmers or agribusinesses, utilizing alternative data sources (e.g., satellite data, farm production history, local market trends) to assess creditworthiness.
- Serve as the business thought leader and ensure scoring and lending decisions are aligned with the product strategy.
- Collaborate with product, tech, finance and data teams to ensure credit risk is mitigated across the entire lifecycle, and effectively mitigate risks common in agriculture, such as crop failure, price volatility, weather-related disruptions, and seasonal income fluctuations.
Regulatory and Compliance
- Work closely with legal, risk and regulatory teams to ensure products meet all regulatory requirements.
- Support financial partners in getting any regulatory approvals required for the products.
Performance Monitoring and Optimization
- Monitor KPIs to assess product success and identify areas for improvement. This includes analyzing data, conducting A/B testing, and making data-driven decisions to optimize product performance.
- Co-ordinate market research to track customer feedback and inform product refinements and ongoing development.
- Support commercial teams to ensure product delivery is on-track and customer growth and retention are aligned with the product strategy.
- Support finance teams to ensure product is commercially viable.
- Build awareness and understanding of the products across the company – be Digifarm’s financial products ‘evangelist’.
- Evaluate the broader social and economic impact of the financial products on farmers and the agricultural community.
Key performance indicators:
- Development of products and product strategies aligned with customer needs and with differentiated value propositions.
- On-time delivery of product roadmaps and proven product-market fit for all products.
- Development and implementation of credit scoring models and risk mitigation strategies that are fit for each product.
- Successful execution of financial partnerships (banks, fintechs etc) to support product growth.
- Defined controls and fully documented processes for each product, with no audit or regulatory issues.
- Commercially viable products with positive P&L impact, and clear path to scale.
- Achievement of set KPIs for each product, including growth and retention of customers.
Core competencies, knowledge and experience:
- Agricultural Expertise: Understanding the agricultural value chain, challenges, and risks in farming.
- Product Development: Designing financial products tailored to the agricultural sector, including loans, insurance, and savings.
- Risk Management: Expertise in assessing agricultural risks and developing credit scoring and risk management models.
- Tech-Savvy: Proficiency in fintech platforms, mobile banking solutions, and leveraging data analytics for decision-making.
- Regulatory Knowledge: Familiarity with financial and agricultural regulations and compliance requirements.
- Stakeholder Management: Building relationships with financial institutions, tech partners, and agricultural stakeholders.
- Customer-Centric Approach: Designing user-friendly products and improving financial inclusion and literacy among customers.
- Project Management: Leading product development with agile methodologies and efficient resource management.
- Collaboration: Ability to work across teams and drive stakeholders to meet the product vision and mission.
- Impact Measurement: Tracking product performance and measuring social and economic impact.
- Entrepreneurial Mindset: Problem-solving, adaptability, and ownership in a fast-paced startup environment.
- Innovation: Ability to innovate, identify and drive forward new opportunities into a commercial product.
- Communication: Ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders at all levels and build strong relationships based on trust and respect.
- Leadership: Collaborative leader who can motivate and support teams to thrive and deliver their best.
- Agility: Growth mindset to thrive within an early stage venture and work within unstructured environments.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management, Computer science, Engineering or related Product Development field.
- Minimum 8 years post-graduation work experience; at least 4 years must be in a role related to credit solutions (preference for agri-fintech or digital financial services).
- Experience building and launching new financial products from initial ideation to market launch.
How to Apply. If you feel that you are up to the challenge and possess the necessary qualification and experience, kindly proceed to create/ update your candidate profile on the recruitment portal and then Click on the apply button. Remember to attach your resume.
