Director of Reconciliation Strategy

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