Senior Director, Business Planning & Operations SSAVISA

Principle Responsibilities / Key Results Area

• The Snr Director-Business Planning and Operations will lead collaboration across the SSA region by providing support in financial planning, pricing, decision-making, competitive tracking, managing strategic business initiatives, client support programs, management reporting, insights and related areas.  

Primary responsibilities of this position are:

• Lead with the Finance team the annual business planning cycle, manage cross-functional discussions, review all proposals, and ensure optimal investment of resources in order to finalize the operating plan for SSA
• Identify, structure, and manage complex issues to arrive at recommendations that drive corporate objectives.
• Drive solving of a range of business problems by collaborating and coordinating with multiple internal stakeholders.
• Oversee major project work streams related to Visa business and strategic priorities in SSA
• Collaborate with business line management across SSA
• Provide leadership to the BPO team and ensure the delivery of functional objectives

Qualifications:

• Strong project management and analytical skills
• Strategic thinking, and financial acumen required to be a trusted advisor
• Personal presence and ability to clearly communicate, verbally and in writing, compelling messages to senior managers and other stakeholders
• Self-confident and hands-on, with the ability to operate in a fast paced and constantly changing work environment
• Ability to rally corporate resources and functional experts to drive business objectives
• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills to influence and build credibility with various SSA functions and Country teams, in order to work in a matrix organization
• Project management skills and strong execution ability to deliver against tight deadlines
• Collaborative and resilient
• Ability to learn quickly, deal with complexity and lead change
• Aptitude to source relevant information and make timely decisions, tolerance for ambiguity
• Ability to quickly assess an opportunity, using industry experience and fact-based analyses
• Advanced MS Excel and MS PowerPoint

Required Experience:

• Postgraduate degree from a top-tier institution in a business relevant discipline
• Minimum of 12 years work experience in Management, and Corporate Strategy or a related function
• Experience in managing people
• Experience in and/or significant exposure to the financial services/payments industry required
• Global or multi-national business experience strongly preferred, preferably in the SSA region
• Experience in handling projects with multiple work streams, and coordinating complex cross-enterprise processes with multiple stakeholders at both senior and junior levels
• Maintain business landscape knowledge to provide solid foundational context to critical strategic projects
• Research and analyse internal/ external data, information and trends to present client and market level insights to the SSA leadership team
• Communicate and generate support for recommendations among business leaders across the organization
• Provide frameworks and perspectives relevant to business objectives
• Maintain tight alignment and work closely with Functional and Country management teams, acting as a project manager on strategic or pan-regional projects, and bringing timely and useful insight, perspective, analytical support, and research resources
• Work with minimal direction, usually within a complex and often ambiguous environment, to drive rigorous, fact-based recommendations to regional management
• Balance facilitation, influence, and content contribution to help business leaders design their strategies and achieve their goals.  
• Support all functions and geographies in SSA
• Prepare regular management reporting and presentation documents when required
• Oversee the Sales Playbook implementation for SSA, ensuring that both the strategic account management approach and the technology are effectively adopted
• Lead the hosting/managing of Visa Internal/external events such as Client Forum, Staff Offsite, BD training week and specific key regional client events in line with the event Strategy