The Manager – Merchant & Mini-App Ecosystem role at KCB Bank Kenya is central to expanding and optimizing the bank’s digital ecosystem focused on merchants and mini-app partners. The successful candidate will drive the end-to-end management of this ecosystem, ensuring seamless integration, high adoption rates, and sustained digital revenue growth.
Role Purpose
The job holder is responsible for executing and driving the bank’s end-to-end digital merchant and partner ecosystem, including hands-on oversight of the mini-apps program. This role actively manages day-to-day relationships with mini-app partners and key merchants, coordinates the development and continuous enhancement of mini-apps and merchant solutions, and ensures smooth technical integration across the bank’s digital channels to deliver a seamless digital experience for merchants and partners.
The position manages the full merchant and partner lifecycle from acquisition and onboarding to growth and retention, ensuring frictionless payments, simplified transactions, rapid issue resolution, and optimized user journeys. The job holder is also responsible for implementing initiatives that increase platform adoption, engagement, and digital revenue. He/She will deliver new digital experiences and revenue opportunities by executing customer value propositions, targeted growth activities, and high-impact merchant and partner programs.
Success is measured by the strength of partner relationships, mini-app and merchant performance, increased platform usage, optimized digital experiences, and sustained growth in transactions and digital revenue.
Key Responsibilities
- Manage the Merchant & Mini-App Ecosystem: Manage day-to-day operations of the bank’s digital merchant and partner ecosystem, including mini-app partners, ensuring smooth operations, partner support, and continuous growth in platform usage and transactions.
- Execute Merchant and Partner Acquisition & Onboarding: Carry out onboarding activities for new merchants and partners, ensuring all requirements, documentation, integrations, and setup steps are completed accurately and efficiently.
- Coordinate Mini-App Development & Integration: Coordinate mini-app development and updates, track delivery progress, manage testing and quality checks, and ensure all integrations meet platform and technical standards.
- Deliver Merchant Digital Experience & Product Enhancements: Work closely with product, UX, and engineering teams to implement new features, enhancements, and fixes that improve merchant and mini-app user journeys.
- Manage Merchant & Partner Relationships: Cultivate and maintain strong relationships with new and existing merchants and partners, handle day-to-day communication, issue resolution, and operational coordination.
- Execute Merchant Programs & Growth Activities: Implement merchant programs, promotions, and value propositions to increase the number of mini-apps, drive adoption, engagement, and transaction volume, and contribute towards strategy development.
- Monitor Data & Operational Performance: Track merchant and mini-app metrics, analyze traffic and transaction data, identify trends, issues or opportunities, and recommend operational adjustments.
- Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams: Work closely with other departments to ensure the platform meets security standards and provides seamless, low-friction user journeys.
- Monitor Performance & Communicate Results: Prepare and deliver regular reports on merchant activity, mini-app performance, customer engagement, and partner feedback for management, deriving insights for product enhancements.
- Ensure Compliance and Ethical Standards: Adhere to relevant regulatory policies and ethical guidelines in the management of all merchant activities and mini-apps operations and lifestyle programs.
Daily Responsibilities
- Collaborate with internal teams to define technical and commercial requirements for new merchant, partner, and mini-app features, ensuring solutions are delivered effectively and enhance customer engagement.
- Drive mini-app and merchant feature adoption by using data insights, user feedback, and continuous experimentation to implement improvements and resolve performance gaps.
- Act as the internal advocate for the merchant journey, ensuring mini-app submissions, onboarding processes, and solution management are intuitive, efficient, and aligned with merchant needs.
- Coordinate with merchants, technical partners, platform teams, and payment providers to support seamless deployment, perform quality checks, and ensure all integrations meet technical and operational standards.
- Monitor daily transactional performance across merchants and partners, quickly identifying issues and working with support and technology teams to resolve platform or merchant-related problems.
Required Functional Competencies & Key Success Factors
- Customer obsession – possess a deep understanding of customer needs, behavior, and the ability to design personalized experiences that drive engagement and loyalty.
- Analytical and data driven decision making – able to source, manipulate and analyze massive data sets from various sources, digest this data complexity & churn out insights that lead to solutions and an ability communicate that in a clear and concise manner.
- Problem solving – above average cognitive ability, able to join dots across diverse data sets and give meaning to complex issues and drive creative solutions.
- Tech savvy – understands technology and is a digital native.
- Good understanding of customer journey mapping and user experience testing.
- Ability to collaborate and work with diverse teams.
- Ability to perform under pressure and deliver results against odds.
- Communicates effectively (good verbal and written English).
- Listens effectively and guides with empathy and care.
- Exhibits emotional intelligence essentials.
Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor's degree from a recognized university.
- Member of a relevant professional body e.g. CIM / Product Management / Project management is an added advantage.
- Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) / Marketing / Any Related Field is an added advantage.
- At least 5 years’ work experience in the same or related role, with substantial experience across:
- Developing digital financial platforms (e.g., financial services, banking, payments & investment platforms) (5 years).
- Merchant/Partner Management (4 years).
- Engagement, retention and churn reduction (3 years).
- Driving revenue growth and commercial acumen (5 years).
- Go-To-Market strategies (2 years).
- Customer service and value management (3 years).
- Service design, user experience and customer journeys optimization (3 years).
- Digital marketing / product management (2 years).
- Experience in data analytics and business intelligence (3 years) is desirable.
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