Key Account Manager

About this role

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

We’re looking for a Key Account Manager who is commercially driven, data-oriented, and passionate about building strong, long-term partnerships. In this role, you’ll be responsible for owning and growing a portfolio of strategic corporate payment partners, driving their performance and identifying opportunities to expand their use of Wave’s products.

You’ll combine relationship management, commercial strategy, and operational problem-solving to ensure our partners are successful. You’ll also lead and develop a team of Account Supervisors, working closely with cross-functional teams to deliver against our growth objectives and continuously improve the partner experience.

In this role you'll;

Own and grow a portfolio of corporate partners

• Manage a portfolio of key corporate payment partners, and act as their main business and operational point of contact.

• Engage closely with partner stakeholders to build strong relationships, understand their business, and identify blockers to growth.

• Run regular business reviews with your partners: performance against targets, product roadmap, open issues.

• Identify growth opportunities and cross-sell new payment products across your portfolio.

• Detect early churn signals volume decline, drop in unique payers, inactive stores and act on them before they turn into losses.

• Build and execute a growth roadmap per account, sequenced by cycle objectives, with clear owners and deadlines.

Drive commercial performance

• Lead the analysis of merchant performance: identify what is working and what is not, and take action to ensure a high standard of service and sustainable growth.

• Prepare and defend pricing proposals: document current volume, growth commitments and competitive pressure, and structure fee reductions as volume-conditioned tiers rather than flat concessions.

• Drive in-field activation at partner locations, staff training, point-of-sale visibility and branding materials so that signed partners actually transact.

• Onboard new partners onto our standard payment products, from commercial agreement to first transactions, and own their ramp-up to target volume.

Ensure operational excellence

• Ensure high-quality customer support by advocating for partners' needs and resolving issues related to our products, including refunds, settlements and funding requests.

• Act as first-level resolution for partner incidents, coordinating with Finance, Support and Product until closure.

• Work closely with our Risk & Fraud team to minimize fraud cases and threats to the security of payment partners.

• Monitor your team portfolio for abnormal activity, unexplained payer spikes, atypical transaction patterns and escalate promptly.

• Identify priority areas and develop solutions to Wave's payments liquidity needs nationwide, with a focus on merchant expansion.

Work with data

• Track your portfolio on our dashboards, run a weekly pulse (wow), and turn what you see into a short list of prioritized actions.

• Report clearly and consistently on portfolio health, open actions and risks to your Lead and to cross-functional stakeholders.

Lead your team

• Manage, coach and grow a team of account supervisors: set priorities, run regular 1:1s, and hold a high performance bar.

• Provide guidance and feedback that strengthen the knowledge and skills your team needs to meet company OKRs.

• Develop playbooks and workflows for your team, and keep training material for products, campaigns and features up to date.

• Work closely with internal teams Sales, Admin, Corporate Support, Finance, Compliance, Marketing, Product, to align on critical goals and implement strategies.

• Help shape Wave's global strategy by sharing insights and learnings from the Côte d'Ivoire team's experience.

• Lead by living Wave's values, and ensure they're deeply ingrained within your team

Key details

• Location: Abidjan

• Work authorization in Côte d'Ivoire is required.

• This is a permanent position.

• Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula.

• We offer generous health insurance for yourself and your dependents.

• We support working parents - we offer generous parental leave policies (26 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers) and subsidized childcare when you return to work.

• We help you live your fullest life now! We subsidize gym memberships and fitness classes.

• Airtime reimbursement.

• Free food and a beautiful office space.

Requirements

• A degree in general management, sales, project management, finance, international relations, business management, or a comparable field.

• At least 5 years of experience in a similar position (ideally in an international company, a bank, a mobile money company, or similar) with a minimum of 2 years experience at a managerial position.

• Relevant experience either in operations, sales, support, or distribution.

• Fluency in French

• Good level in English - this role will…