Head of Strategy and Innovation

About Kitovu

Kitovu is a forward-thinking fintech company revolutionizing financial services in the Rwandan market. Our mission is to provide inclusive, accessible, and innovative financial solutions that empower individuals and businesses. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and a deep understanding of local markets, Kitovu aims to bridge the financial gap and enhance financial inclusion for millions of people.

Role Overview

As the Head of Strategy and Innovation, you will be a key leader in driving processes and decision making within Kitovu. Operating at the intersection of strategy, data, and execution, you will lead our innovation effortsturning market insights into MVPs and pilots; and orchestrating cross-functional teams to launch and scale products that drive inclusion and growth. You will steward market and regulatory intelligence, and embed an innovation culture that balances speed, compliance, and commercial rigor.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Vision: Develop and articulate the multi-year strategy for new products and market expansion in Rwanda, aligned to company objectives and regulatory realities (BNR, data privacy).
• Alternative Lending: Oversee the end-to-end build of inclusive lending products in Rwanda for thin-file customers using alternative data (e.g., mobile money, telco, cash-flow). Define the credit thesis and underwriting, run pilots to GA, align with BNR/KYC/consumer-protection requirements, secure MNO/bank partners, and oversee portfolio unit economics.
• Process Design and Innovation: Implement best practices to optimize decision making, and foster a culture of agility and innovation.
• Incubation Unit Leadership: Build and run an internal incubation unit: discovery hypothesis MVP pilot scale/kill; set stage-gates, budgets, and reporting.
• Market Analysis (Rwanda first): Work closely with Head of Business Development to segment Rwandas opportunities (consumer, MSME, agent networks, remittances, alt-lending); identify priority use-cases and competitive dynamics.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with other teams to design processes that ensure seamless build, launch, and scale.
• Pilot Management: Design and run in-market pilots with clear success metrics, experiment plans, and dashboards; collect insights to refine propositions.
• Data & ML Enablement: Prioritize analytics and ML use-cases (risk/fraud, pricing, limits, churn/LTV, personalization); ensure experimentation, model evaluation, and monitoring.
• Market & Regulatory Intelligence: Maintain a live view of industry trends, BNR circulars, scheme rules, and ecosystem shifts (RSwitch, MNOs, banks); brief leadership regularly.

Skills

• Product: Product management; comfortable managing products from inception through launch and iteration in Rwanda and/or the EAC.
• Credit: Proven expertise in credit products and risk: scorecard/ML literacy, pricing & limit setting, portfolio analytics, collections strategy; fluency with mobile money data and model governance.
• Rwanda/East Africa Advantage: Compliance fluency, familiarity with BNR requirements, RSwitch, and MTN/Airtel Money ecosystems.
• Data Fluency: Skilled in metrics design, funnel analytics, A/B testing; able to query data (SQL/BI) and build/review dashboards.
• Machine Learning Understanding: Strong reasoning about features/objectives, evaluation, monitoring, and model riskpartnering effectively with data scientists.
• Partnerships: Track record negotiating with banks, MNOs, government, MTOs, or aggregators; strong commercial modeling and SLAs.
• Collaboration: Proven cross-functional leadership; excellent written and verbal communication (Kinyarwanda and/or French a plus).
• Judgment: Ability to drive results and make decisions with imperfect information, and comfort leading teams through ambiguity.
• Communication: Excellent interpersonal skills to engage internal and external stakeholders.
• AI (Bonus): Comfortable designing and deploying LLM-powered workflows (e.g., KYC intelligence, agent/sales copilots, support automation) with strong privacy/safety guardrails.
• Blockchain (Bonus): Familiarity with stablecoin-based settlement and tokenized float to reduce cost, FX friction, and settlement times.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelors or Masters degree; Engineering background or PhD preferred.
• Experience: 5+ years in Strategy & Innovation or Product at a consultancy, fintech, payments, lending, or technology company; hands-on product incubation highly preferred.
• Track Record: Success in growth and scale-up environments; proven ability to drive teams through multiple phases of growth.

Domain: In addition to alternative lending/credit, exposure to at least two of the following:

• Mobile money
• Cross-border/remittance
• Switching/settlement/treasury