Job Description: Project Manager – Customer Credit

Location:  Lusaka, Zambia
Application Deadline: Rolling
Position: Full-time
Team: Customer Credit
Compensation: Competitive salary & benefits commensurate with education and experience

About Fenix
We are building a diverse and inclusive team and  this opportunity is open to any qualified internal and external applicants. Women as well as candidates from Africa and those with experience working on the continent are particularly encouraged to apply for this role.

Fenix International is a next-generation energy and technology company. Our mission is to improve the quality of life of our customers through inclusive energy and financial services. Our flagship product, Fenix Power, is a modular, lease-to-own solar home system financed through affordable installments from just $0.11 per day. We use real-time transaction data to create a next-generation credit score to finance power upgrades and other life-changing loans, unlocking modern financial services for our customers. To date, Fenix has sold over 500,000 Solar Home Systems in Uganda, Zambia, Cote d’Ivoire, Benin, Nigeria and Mozambique, bringing clean, reliable power for lights, phones, radios, TV and much more to over 2,500,000 people.

In early 2018, Fenix joined forces with ENGIE, one of the world’s largest energy companies and a leader in the move to renewable, decentralised and digital energy. This has allowed Fenix to Ensuring strategic alignment of the Fenix Zambia Learning and Development Goals  with business goals and make significant commercial investments to accelerate the path to our mission, via new markets and innovative products. Together, Fenix and ENGIE are making universal access to modern energy a reality.

Job Description

As a Project Manager within the Customer Credit team, you will be a part of revolutionizing credit and financial inclusion for the base of the pyramid. The role will report to the Customer Credit Manager and will work cross-functionally with the rest of our commercial team, customer experience, product development, operations, marketing, and technical teams on the ground to help design, execute, assess and refine innovative consumer finance projects at Fenix.

This position offers an incredible opportunity to make a direct impact on the lives of a largely unbanked customer base with limited access to traditional finance. The right candidate will be a fierce team player and committed coach, with a passion for implementing new approaches and seeing them through from idea, to testing, to scale. As a Customer Credit Project Manager, you will be based in Lusaka, Zambia with travel to the field. You will lead the scoping, design, testing and implementation of projects and interventions that can directly influence customers’ repayment behavior, their positive experience with Fenix, and their ongoing loyalty to the brand—all crucial to the success of the business and in increasing access to financing for bottom of the pyramid consumers.

Key Responsibilities

• Team Culture: Contribute to a team culture that is passionate about our mission and embodies Fenix values
• Innovate & Lead Projects: Design, scope out, implement, manage and monitor specific projects and initiatives to improve the effectiveness and/or efficiency of our Credit operations
  • Work closely with the Zambia team and Global Credit team to design data-driven repayment solutions for our customers across our interaction channels (e.g., SMS, call center, and our field team)
  • Design and implement A/B tests to identify the most powerful ways we can improve customer repayment behavior
  • Build effective, user- and field-friendly systems, processes, and tools that the teams need to make the largest and most cost efficient impact possible on customer repayment patterns
  • Coordinate with Commercial and Customer Experience teams to define protocols for how different teams identify and interact with customers — review and iterate the roles and responsibilities across the company at different stages to (1) support successful onboarding and vetting (2) manage customer repayment (3) diagnose and resolve causes of non-payment and (4) manage deactivations and repossessions in a customer-friendly and proactive manner
• Understand:
  • Consolidate quantitative and qualitative inputs from our customers to fully understand the repayment performance of our customer — the root of why customers pay and why customers don’t pay
  • Structure and implement customer insight research projects, such as mapping the financial lives of households, to deepen our understanding of what drives repayment behaviors
  • Improve the way we collect ongoing quantitative and qualitative data for each customer interaction to gain richer insight into their experience and repayment behavior
  • Monitor and manage credit risk at the portfolio level, using both internal (e.g., product, upgrade eligibility, etc.) and external (e.g., harvest, FX, elections, etc.) data and information
• Global Cross-Pollination: collaborate with other Fenix market teams & Fenix Global team to leverage best practices from Zambia, implement best practices from abroad and brainstorm solutions to common challenges.

Required Skills & Experience

• Excitement about Fenix’s mission and a deep desire to make an impact on off-grid and financially underserved customers in sub-Saharan Africa
• At least 3 -4 years experience in business analysis, project management, strategy, business transformation or similar, particularly in sectors like retail financial services or telecommunications
• Skilled in project management, with an ability to work independently to plan, design and execute initiatives end-to-end, as well as collaborate and execute against strategy
• Exceptional analytical skills and ability to synthesize and interpret qualitative and quantitative data into practical strategy recommendations
• A solid team player who thrives on working with others, as this role will be incredibly cross-functional and require work across the organisation
• Endless curiosity and follow-through, with the ability to identify key problems, their key drivers, propose and conduct analysis, draw conclusions
• Exceptional judgement, problem-solving skills, a desire to think outside the box and ability to “Think Big & Make it Happen” both independently and collaboratively
• Deep empathy for the customer and commitment to inclusivity, consumer protection, & responsible financial services within the context of creating a profitable, scalable enterprise
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communications (English)
• Commitment to live and work with Fenix in Africa for at least 2 years

Desired Skills & Experience

• Experience in analysing financial repayment challenges
• Experience with data analysis and visualization software tools, including SQL, Tableau and other statistical analysis programs (e.g., STATA, R)
• Masters degree or equivalent work experience

To Apply

Please submit your resume and cover letter through the job posting at Fenix International

In your cover letter, please be sure to highlight the following:

1. Why you are interested in Fenix International, and
2. What excites you about this particular role

Fenix offers a competitive salary and a fun, fast-paced and high-growth work environment. We recognize the value of diversity in our workforce, and encourage all qualified candidates to apply. We thank all candidates who choose to apply, however, only those selected for a further interview will be contacted.