Head of Lending, Kenya

Who We Are

Moniepoint is Africa's leading business payments and banking platform. We power the dreams of businesses by giving them everything they need to succeed: payments, banking, credit, and business management tools. Having built Nigeria's most reliable business banking infrastructure, we are now entering Kenya, our first market outside Nigeria and our flagship entry into East Africa.
Why Kenya

Kenya is where our next chapter begins. Following our acquisition of Sumac Microfinance Bank, we're preparing to go live — which means the people we hire here help build a business from its first day, not inherit one. How we execute in Kenya will shape how we approach every market we enter after it, making this one of the most consequential engineering mandates in the business right now. This is the natural extension of our mission: to drive financial inclusion, and help millions of business owners and individuals across the African continent achieve financial happiness and success.

So, now we are looking for our Head of Engineering, Supply Chain to join us in Kenya.
About The Role

The Head of Lending is a pure business role. You own the commercial strategy, the credit strategy, and the P&L for Moniepoint 's lending business in Kenya. You are not a product leader: Product is responsible for building the lending experience and underwriting infrastructure, Data Science builds and tunes the credit models, Risk and Compliance set the risk appetite and regulatory guardrails, and Finance manages funding and capital. Your job is to decide who we lend to, on what terms, at what price, and to run that business profitably, working closely with each of these functions to get there.

You report to the Head of Business, Kenya, and you sit within the Business function: you own the commercial health of the lending product, with the added weight of a full P&L and direct accountability for portfolio performance and credit outcomes.

The mandate starts with SME lending, the segment with the best fit with Moniepoint 's existing merchant base. As the business matures, the scope may extend to other lending products, but your first job is to build a profitable, well-run SME lending business from the ground up.
Your responsibilities:

- Own the lending P&L. You are accountable for the full economics of the lending business: interest and fee revenue, cost of funds, credit losses, and operating costs. You build the budget, the forecast, and the reporting cadence that gives you and the Head of Business clear visibility into portfolio health and profitability.

- Set the commercial and credit strategy. You decide which SME segments to prioritise, what loan products and terms to offer, and how to price for risk. Pricing and risk tolerance sit with you, but neither is set in isolation: risk thresholds are agreed jointly with Risk and Compliance, and any change in pricing or risk appetite is shared with Product, since it changes what customers experience, and with Growth, since it changes what a segment can expect.

- Grow a portfolio with healthy unit economics. You are responsible for building the SME lending book from zero into a significant, profitable portfolio, growing disbursement volumes and revenue while keeping default rates and portfolio quality within agreed limits.

- Drive distribution for lending. You define how lending reaches SME customers, whether through direct sales effort, or partner channels. You work with Growth on which segments to prioritise and how lending fits into the broader customer acquisition motion, without owning segment growth yourself.

- Partner closely with Product, Data Science, Finance, Risk, and Compliance. You do not own any of these functions, but the lending business cannot run without them. You bring the commercial view to Product's roadmap so the right features get built in the right order. You work with Data Science to define what a good underwriting decision looks like and to keep tightening it. You work w