Head, Digital Services at GVA Partners

Job Description

• The digital service works more like a start-up, with product teams that are tightly-knit, flexible and using agile and lean methods to quickly provide customers and employees with innovative digital solutions.
• We combine the latest technologies with customer-centrist design to consistently deliver exciting innovations for customers and employees alike.

Job Summary

• As the Head of the Digital Services, you have the mandate of the CEO to lead the cultural and technical transformation towards digitization through an ’internal startup’ model.

Responsibilities
Responsibilities and functions are as follows:

• Responsible for the success of the digital services (i.e. owns digitization road map and delivery of customer journeys across business divisions).
• Align business units to gather necessary resources and ensure adequate staffing and resourcing and easing journey digitization.
• Guide the team and organization on how to use scrum & agile practices and methodologies.
• Routinely update senior management including via steering committee on progress of the digital initiatives.
• Guarantee consistency and quality of the customer experience across all digital channels and touch points.
• Coach the digital services team, and help them solve problems that may arise from digital opportunities.
• Keep track of key developments in the digital space (in banking and beyond) to identify new ideas, tools and trends (continuous drive to improve quality, reduce time to market, and drive business impact).

Responsibilities
In particular, the position holder should be able to deliver the following:

• Develop and communicate overall product and digital organization vision for the bank’s several business units.
• Design agile roadmap of initiatives in conjunction with business units to achieve client goals.
• Manage relationship with IT and other stakeholders to ensure implementation and commercialization of – and end-user engagement with – tools and ideas on a timely basis.
• Keep track of key developments in the digital space to continually identify new ideas, tools and trends that could provide opportunities.
• Ensure all digital programs have clearly defined metrics to evaluate success and continuous, measurable improvement.
• Incorporate data and analytics tracking in application development to ensure value creation via identifying and exploiting trends, preferences and other information from Customer and E-commerce data.
• Guarantee the consistency and quality of the customer experience across all digital channels and touch points.
• Serve as thought leader and trusted business advisor to senior management and various stakeholders in helping them to improve their personal Digital IQ and the performance of their teams through embracing digital more broadly.
• Develop and lead an highly motivated team with a differentiated culture and establish the bank as a destination of choice for top digital talent.

Experience and Qualifications
Ideal candidate should have:

• Minimum of 10 years deep experience in software architecture and engineering for a B2C or B2B company, preferably in the Service provider, tier 1 bank or Information Technology sector.
• Possesses experience implementing "Best Practice" approaches such as Agile in digital strategy and transformation and is effective in change management.
• Possesses knowledge of modern front-end and back-end development languages, frameworks, and tools, and has built highly scalable, high-performance production systems.
• Dynamic, mature and highly collaborative in working style.
• Experience with Product management, FinTech and Payment systems.
• Possesses working experience in multinational companies, having preferably already managed the complexity of a “corporate role”, that goes from developing the strategic framework all the way to delivering innovative ideas and product and executing in organizations.
• Well-networked in the digital community in Nigeria, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

Ccompetencies
To be successful in this role, candidates will have to demonstrate a successful track record against the following competencies:

Functional Abilities:

• Building a coherent digital strategy, effectively prioritizing and successfully delivering a pipeline of value-creating innovation.
• Strong technological knowledge, covering API architecture, next generation computing, big data analytics.
• Experience in developing state of the art digital products and world-class customer journeys for multiplatform implementation.
• Ability to develop new creative and high-business impact concepts and then take them from discovery phase through to delivery.

Customer Focus:

• Ability to think as a customer, to anticipate new customer needs and to further develop the range of services to the mutual benefit of both the customer and the Bank.
• Good understanding of the needs of both consumers and other stakeholders, e.g. retail, wholesale customers.
• Experience in use of analysis tools, e.g. data mining, to generate customer insights.
• Ability to translate innovation and customer needs into digital strategies and successfully implement and optimize them.
• Ability to creatively disrupt and improve status quo for utmost business value and increased customer satisfaction.
• Ability to anticipate changing customer needs, including the expectations of business partners.

Leadership Skills:

• High level of personal maturity and natural authority.
• Good standing and assertiveness, with excellent team work attitude, with proven ability to influence and coordinate team beyond his/her own department.
• Experience in building and managing successful teams that work well together, particularly cross-functionally.
• Proven determination, ability to show persuasiveness and leadership in difficult situations.
• Ability to deal with decision making processes in complex organizations.
• Strong communication skills in dealing with stakeholders.
• Constantly asking and answer the questions, “how can we get it done?” and always pushing the envelope in innovation despite typical roadblocks.

Personnel Charismatics

• Independent, trustworthy and charismatic with absolute integrity.
• Good measure of creativity, social competence and ability to work on a team.
• Entrepreneurial and proactive management skills and a "can do attitude”
• Integrate easily into the unique cultural environments.
• High energy levels, stress resistance and cultural openness will be therefore highly valued.
• Fluent English is a key requirement for the role..