Agent Operations Territory Lead job at Wave

Our mission

We’re making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That’s for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We’re solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don’t always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that’s where you come in…

How You’ll Help Us Achieve It

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year on year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

We are looking for an Agent Operations Territory Lead who will lead our efforts to expand our user base and manage user acquisition strategies in allocated territories in Mbarara. This role involves leading both user growth operations and agent operations/agent liquidity to help grow our market.

You will manage a team of 7 to 10 distributors (foot soldiers), overseeing our distribution and marketing, talking to and onboarding users, interviewing users about their needs and problems with regards to money transfer and financial services.

In this role, you will be responsible for;

Agent Quality: Ensuring that agents in your territory;

• are compliant with the legal and policy requirements as per defined procedure.
• have executed valid contracts.
• are trained on the contents of the contract before signing the contract.
• are well-branded and have the supplies needed to deliver their services.

Agent Ongoing Liquidity Management: Coordinate the monitoring of cash / e-value availability at Agents in liaison with the Liquidity team.

Risk Management and Routine Visitation: Manage the teams in Monitoring of Agent vs. targets through Reports on emerging issues and assessment of the region’s performance.

Agent Churn: Identify underperforming agents (as per internal procedure), troubleshoot or recover Wave items & equipment and ensure branding material is removed.

Be the primary contact person for all agency networks acquiring & Wave products in your region/territory. Execute operational excellence, cost management and compliance with internal policies and regulatory guidelines.

Champion excellent customer service and implementation of quality service delivery standards while coaching, training and mentoring your team to achieve the desired market impact and targets.

Scout zones where distribution should happen and give guidance on the zone where your distributors should focus.

Make sure distributors have all the necessary supplies and work materials daily.

Report daily on distribution efforts, needs, and feedback from the field to the Regional lead.

Help with the training and smooth onboarding of new distributors and enforce a good work environment and team-building.

Key Details

Location: This is a field sales role. You will be based in Mbarara and may travel to other field locations across the country as needed.

Work authorization in Uganda is required

This is a permanent position

Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula. We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses to strong performers who have been with the company for more than 6 months.

We offer generous health insurance for yourself and your dependents

We support working parents – we offer 26 weeks of parental leave for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers, in addition to subsidized child care when they return to work

Airtime reimbursement.

Lunch and field facilitation are provided.

Requirements

• 3+ years of sales experience in user acquisition/agent operations and liquidity management within mobile money, finance, fintech, telecoms, or tech.
• Proven sales ability with a successful track record in sales, including identifying customer needs and connecting corridors.
• Language: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in both English and a local language.
• Exceptional interpersonal skills in building and maintaining positive relationships.

You might be a good fit if you

• Are deeply analytical in your approach to marketing and in optimizing the cost of customer acquisition, and are metrics-oriented and experienced in leading teams towards KPIs.
• Are proactive, disciplined in your thoughts and actions, and committed to continuous self-improvement and professional development.
• Possess the humility, mission focus, and resolve to do what it takes to achieve growth goals.
• Build strong relationships and bring out the best in people.
• Excel at leadership and enjoy managing diverse and large field ops teams.
• Are a strong communicator and are comfortable defaulting to overreaching when it comes to coordination.
• Think from first principles about how things should work.
• Are excessively detail-oriented and seek to achieve excellence in everything you do.
• Are a self-starter and proactive about achieving ambitious targets and willing to go the distance to get something done.
• Adjust quickly to changing priorities and conditions.

Our team

Get Executive Coaching

We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world.

We’re deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.

We foster autonomy for our employees. You’ll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.

We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.

We are on Y Combinator’s top companies by revenue .

• Ensuring that agents in your territory are compliant with legal and policy requirements.
• Ensuring agents have executed valid contracts and are trained on their contents.
• Ensuring agents are well-branded and have necessary supplies.
• Coordinating the monitoring of cash/e-value availability at Agents.
• Managing teams in monitoring Agent vs. targets through reports.
• Identifying underperforming agents, troubleshooting, recovering Wave items & equipment, and ensuring branding material removal.
• Acting as the primary contact person for all agency networks and Wave products in the region.
• Executing operational excellence, cost management, and compliance.
• Championing excellent customer service and quality service delivery standards.
• Coaching, training, and mentoring the team.
• Scouting zones for distribution and guiding distributors.
• Ensuring distributors have necessary supplies and work materials daily.
• Reporting daily on distribution efforts, needs, and feedback.
• Assisting with the training and onboarding of new distributors.
• Enforcing a good work environment and team-building.

• Sales experience in user acquisition/agent operations and liquidity management
• Proven sales ability and track record
• Identifying customer needs
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in English and a local language
• Exceptional interpersonal skills
• Analytical approach to marketing and customer acquisition cost optimization
• Metrics-oriented and experienced in leading teams towards KPIs
• Proactive and disciplined
• Commitment to continuous self-improvement
• Humility, mission focus, and resolve
• Ability to build strong relationships
• Leadership and team management skills
• Strong communication skills
• Detail-oriented
• Self-starter and proactive
• Ability to adjust quickly to changing priorities

• 3+ years of sales experience in user acquisition/agent operations and liquidity management within mobile money, finance, fintech, telecoms, or tech.
• Proven sales ability with a successful track record in sales, including identifying customer needs and connecting corridors.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in both English and a local language.
• Exceptional interpersonal skills in building and maintaining positive relationships.