Director of Reconciliation Strategy

Posted Aug 30

About Zepz

Zepz is the group powering two leading global remittance brands: WorldRemit and Sendwave. Since 2010, we have been disrupting an industry previously dominated by offline legacy players with our relentless focus on reducing the cost of remittances and increasing safety and convenience for our users. 

Every day, our people work to unlock the prosperity of cross-border communities through finance and technology - driven by our vision of a world that celebrates migrants’ impact on prosperity, at home and abroad.

In 2023, our brands helped cross-border communities send over $15bn from 50 countries to recipients in 130 countries. We operate over 2800 money transfer corridors worldwide and employ over 1,000 people globally. Zepz is a remote-first employer, with team members located across six continents

Come join us!

Zepz.io

Our Commitments:

  1. We act like owners - We are relentlessly delivering for our users and spending money thoughtfully. 
  2. We embrace embarrassing honesty - We function best when we're open and honest with one another — especially about our challenges and doubts. 
  3. We have a bias to action - We get to first outcomes quickly, iterate and learn. 
  4. We strive to be better - We may make mistakes, but always learn from them.
  5. We are inclusive - to better reflect and serve our users. 

About The Role:

Zepz is looking for an innovative, product-minded and mission driven leader to run our new 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.

Key Areas of Ownership:

  • Scaling 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
  • Leading on cross-functional efforts to improve our reconciliation processes with your counterparts in product, engineering and finance 
  • Minimizing business and user losses by obsessively tracking them and digging into and resolving root causes
  • Collaborating closely with the Finance team to align reconciliation processes with financial reporting requirements and leading on the design, review and maintenance of relevant accounting policies
  • Lead the work of three sub-teams: 
  • Data Team focused on obtaining timely partner data, reformatting it and uploading it to our accounting software
  • Payin and Payout Financial Reconciliation Teams made up of ~45 finance professionals performing reconciliations of our payin and payout partner accounts
  • Investigations & Disputes Team running investigations of all mismatched transactions with our partners and a disputes process where there is disagreement

About You:

You have experience in financial accounting but are a true operator at heart, constantly seeking to automate, improve and above all deliver for the end customer. You are data-driven with a product mindset. You have strong attention to detail yet also thrive when stepping back to drive strategic improvement across a function and wider business. 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 can effectively run globally diverse teams across multiple timezones and have a proven track record of successful cross-functional collaboration to achieve common end goals. You are comfortable reporting to senior stakeholders, including our 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. 

What You Bring to the Table:

  • 10+ years of experience leading and motivating teams through operational transformation
  • 10+ years experience working finance, preferably in FinTech, financial services, payments or other high transaction volume industry
  • You are a qualified accountant or can demonstrate a thorough understanding of the accounting environment, including strong understanding of financial principles, accounting standards (IFRS and US GAAP), regulatory requirements relating to payment businesses (FCA, NBB and US State Regulators), and reconciliation methodologies
  • Familiarity with reconciliation tools and ERP systems
  • Comfort with reporting analytics, SQL experience strongly preferred (can write your own queries / build dashboards) 
  • Self-starter who is comfortable with ambiguity, detail oriented and thrives in fast-paced cross-functional settings 
  • Strong communication and interpersonal skills

Bonus points:

  • Experience managing finance operation function for global businesses at scale, needing to adapt to new requirements for new products and markets
  • Finance transformation and automation experience, utilizing tools and technology to automate reconciliation and other finance processes
  • Blackline experience

What we offer you: 

Please note that the benefits below will apply to permanent roles.  

We have five core benefits for our talent in the US, UK, Philippines, Poland, and South Africa. If you're not in one of those regions, don’t worry - the Talent team can let you know what is available for you specifically:

  • Unlimited Annual Leave: Most Zepz team members are eligible for unlimited annual leave. Colleagues in customer-facing roles, receive a competitive holiday allowance and four recharge days a year. Feel free to make the most of your time off and maintain a healthy work-life balance! 
  • Private Medical Cover: ​​You can opt-in to a Private Medical Insurance scheme. This provides you with access to thorough medical coverage, so you can feel confident in your health and well-being.              
  • Retirement: We offer pension schemes to help you plan for and secure your future. 
  • Life Assurance: Life assurance is available to give you peace of mind and protect your loved ones in case of the unexpected.
  • Parental Leave: We offer competitive parental leave schemes to ensure you are spending as much quality time with your new bundle of joy as possible. 

We are also remote-first as an organisation, offering flexibility for you to work where you need to be most productive. In many locations, we have workspaces, which you can use as you desire. Most roles in the Philippines are predominately office-based, with this we offer free meals for those 100% on-site.  

In addition to the above, you will discover that we have a range of secondary perks (such as the cycle-to-work scheme and employee discounts) depending on your location, to help you thrive at Zepz!  

Why choose Zepz? 

  • Our team of over 1,000 employees is fully distributed across the world. We are working from coffee shops, homes, and co-working spaces — making us one of the larger fully distributed growth-stage startups in the world but we also offer workspace in our talent cluster locations - spaces we can meet, collaborate and connect.
  • We are proud parents, community organizers, farmers, band members, yoga teachers, YouTube influencers, former Olympians, and serial entrepreneurs.
  • We collectively speak over twenty languages, including Akuapem, Amharic, Bengali, Ewe, Fante, Ga, Igbo, Kalenjin, Luganda, Oromo, Somali, Swahili, Wolof, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
  • At Zepz, embodying our commitments binds us together. We are collectively passionate about striving to achieve our vision and purpose - to continue to provide the best service to our users.

Ready to Apply?

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. If interested, please submit your resume along with a cover letter (optional), highlighting why your experience demonstrates you meet the requirements of the role. Please also indicate the countries in which you have work authorization.

Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But we'll let you in on a secret: there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. Zepz is a place where everyone can thrive. 

So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, and if at all you might need any form of support to make the process as comfortable as possible, please let us know and give us a shot by applying. We want you to be excited to wake up to make an impact every day.