Nigeria Credit Operations Manager at Engie Africa

Responsibilities, Deliverables and Activities

The Customer Finance Team plays a pivotal role in ensuring the overall success of our largely unbanked customers in completing their loans and getting continued access to clean, reliable energy. Engie Energy Access is looking for an Operations Manager who will ensure that we have the right policies, processes and controls in place to best serve our customers and manage both general and credit operations activities. The role holder will be a key leader in combatting customer and field team fraud and product tamper in the field. He/She will work closely with the Customer Finance, Commercial, Customer Experience and Operations teams to make sure that we highlight areas of risk in our customer credit cycle, and collaborate closely with the Customer Finance Management to build strong systems and processes that effectively mitigate these risks. 

Responsibilities

• Designing Nigeria Credit Operation Strategies

1. Work closely with Head of Customer Finance, Head of Commercial and Head of Customer experience to design innovative and data driven credit solutions for our customer overdue calls.
2. Lead the operationalization of new systems and process getting buy-in from the implementing team and ensuring they have the right tools and support to successfully roll out.
3. Work with the Customer Experience Team to ensure there are adequate resources allocated to customer finance related work, and optimal level of productivity and performance within the team.

• Manage core field teams:

1. Build a team of Customer Finance representatives and Zonal credit managers across the country who manages the ensure fulfillment of monthly collection target.
2. Lead management of the teams that lead our customer-facing credit and fraud interventions.
3. Recruit and on board more staff to scale up the teams where necessary.
4. Mentor the team to continuously build their critical thinking and execution skills so that they can maximize their contributions to EEA (ENGIE Energy Access) Nigeria and grow with the company.
5. Coordinate with Commercial and Customer Experience team to define protocols for how different teams interact with customers so that we encourage good repayment behavior in an inclusive and customer-friendly way.

• Stakeholders and Credit Project Management

1. Build a start to finish credit related projects within and outside the department by engaging all stakeholders: Commercial, Customer Experience, Operation for successful implementation.
2. Manage an appropriate cost-benefit budgeting system for core field teams.
3. Work closely with the Marketing team in building data driven, cost-efficient and sustainable customer promotions that improves customer repayment and drives towards achieving collection target.
4. Hold monthly engagement with State Business Managers to identify and implement key projects that will improve customers repayment.

• Monitoring, Training and Approvals:

1. Monitor dashboards and report on performance of all Customer Finance related work happening through the field team, help the relevant teams in creating action plans to course-correct where needed.
2. Conduct quarterly credit training for Managers identify gaps within the system and ways to improve on them.
3. Grant approval for Loans for Large Kits based on approved credit risk and limit.
4. Help foster and encourage a “culture of credit,” understanding of and compliance to standards and performance management against credit KPIs amongst the field team and get regular feedback and ideas from this team to improve how we run our operations.

Knowledge and skills 

Experience:

• 4+yrs leadership experience working in an organization with the field team, preferably in energy access, asset-financing, microfinance etc.
• A proven team player and cross-department collaborator, who is also an independent thinker.
• Willingness to spend time in the field with our customers and teams to truly understand and improve how systems and processes are being implemented “on the ground.”
• Strong written and verbal communication skills (English) to understand pain points, generate buy in and effectively communicate results.
• Experience working with and implementing projects that require cross-functional buy-in and collaboration through field staff in a market like Nigeria.
• Ability to hold teams accountable for following our process and achieving targets and not being afraid to raise issues (with solutions) as they come up.
• Ability to analyze processes/performance and make suggestions & improvements is a big plus-Experience with communicating data to drive operational performance with data visualization tools like Tableau/PowerBI/Python/R is a plus (being able to effectively build out requirements for such dashboards to be built by others is a must)
• Being tech-savvy and confident in your ability to work with new data/tech tools and continuously looking to build your data analysis, visualization and communication skills is a must!
• Demonstrated experience building out dashboards that take complex inputs/processes and simplify them to be actionable and insightful to have a direct impact on improving operational performance is a big plus; willingness to put time and effort into building up skills in these areas is a must
• Experience with effective system/process design, especially in the energy access context
• Good data analysis skills and a strong desire to continuously learn more in this area to help others make data-driven decisions/recommendations.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of bachelor's degree in a related subject such as energy, Statistics, finance, microfinance, engineering, project/operations management.
• Master's degree in related field like microfinance, operations, risk management is a plus

Language:

• English and proficiency in one or more Nigerian languages is a big plus 

Technology:

• Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Experience using data analysis tools e.g., Excel, SQL, Python/R etc.