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Senior Manager, Card Portfolio Management (Payments Futurist)
Card Business – Nairobi, Nairobi
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.
