Director - Reconciliation Strategy

About The Role:

Zepz is looking for an innovative, product-minded and mission driven leader to run our end-to-end Financial Reconciliation Team. This is a cross-functional team made up of data analysts, accountants and operations managers. Its scope reaches beyond performing traditional financial reconciliations to cover upstream partner data procurement and analysis, downstream investigations of mismatched records, and cross-org engagement to fix root causes of reconciliation breaks. This team’s core mission is to ensure that we accurately represent money owed to or from partners in our financial statements. It is the ultimate backstop to make sure Zepz is doing right by every user in paying out their funds and getting back money we’re owed to further invest in our business. It prevents losses by quickly surfacing errors in our payments processes before they compound and works cross-functionally to fix the problems.

What you will own: Reporting to the Sr Director, Payment Operations, you will :

• Scale our operations to achieve quick and accurate financial reconciliations of all payment partner activities through focus on automation, process improvement and proactive engagement of internal and external stakeholders

• Lead on strategic cross-functional efforts to improve our reconciliation processes and loss detection with your counterparts in finance, product and engineering

• Minimize losses by obsessively tracking them, recovering funds, and resolving root causes to prevent recurrence

• Collaborate closely with the Finance team to align reconciliation processes with financial reporting requirements and lead on the design, review and maintenance of relevant accounting policies and reporting mechanisms 

• As part of the Zepz Senior Leadership Team, you will lead a team of ~35 people across multiple teams covering a large business scope, including:

  • Obtaining timely partner data, reformatting it and uploading it to our accounting software

  • Performing financial reconciliations of all partner accounts and transactions, with impeccable review processes and data hygiene 

  • Resolving unmatched items or breaks, with regular reporting + ageing analysis 

  • Identifying, investigating, and resolving the root causes of reconciliation issues and losses, which are often complex and technical in nature

  • Disputing losses with external partners, and other loss recovery efforts 

  • Mapping partner API responses on transactions to actions in our system  

What You Bring to the Table:

• 10+ years experience in Finance / Operations in FinTech, financial services, payments or other high transaction volume industry

• Qualified accountant + can demonstrate a thorough understanding of the accounting environment, including strong understanding of financial principles, accounting standards, regulatory requirements relating to payment businesses, and reconciliation methodologies

• Experience regularly reviewing, analysing, and managing data and reporting mechanisms, and presenting topline summaries to senior stakeholders

• Experience negotiating and working with external partners on financial matters 

• Experience working day-to-day with Finance and Product / Engineering teams to achieve shared objectives and outcomes

• You have a proven track record of creating and developing automated solutions and processes to improve efficiency

• You have experience effectively managing teams and are comfortable in both making and managing necessary but potentially unpopular or uncomfortable decisions, such as re-orienting how your team has worked in the past or what they have owned in the past

• You have strong attention to detail yet also thrive when stepping back to drive strategic improvement across a function and wider business

• You are mission-driven, never losing sight of the impact your work has on our customers, and instill the same relentless focus within your teams. 

• When you see that a process or roadmap doesn’t exist, isn’t working, or is breaking you dive in to proactively and comprehensively resolve it within your team and across functions that engage with your team.

• You are comfortable reporting to senior stakeholders, including our CFO and board, and can break down complex problems for a wide variety of audiences. You are mission-driven, never losing sight of the impact your work has on our customers, and instill the same relentless focus within your teams. 

Working Style:

• Exceptional written and verbal communication, with demonstrated success working in remote environments + collaborating with Finance and Product / Engineering teams

• World-class, ruthless prioritizer - you can quickly take a long list of priorities and stack rank them based on what’s most important to do first, and why. You are comfortable putting tasks on the back burner, so you can focus on the highest impact work - with a track record of managing teams who do the same

• Develop solutions from first principles – “what is the best way to do this” rather than defaulting to what has been done before. You don’t stop asking “why” until you understand the root cause of an issue.

• Results-driven and not afraid to roll up your sleeves to get things done no matter the task

• Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-paced, and quickly changing contexts

Bonus points:

• Experience with SQL / Mode

• Familiarity with Payments API integrations 

• Experience using Autorek and / or Blackline