Operations Specialist - Back Office

About the role

Old Mutual is looking for an Operations Specialist to coordinate and supervise its back-office operations, ensuring efficient digital loan processing, strong operational controls, timely customer onboarding, effective sales-agent administration and consistent service delivery. The role supports the scaling of private employer payroll and annuitants lending, as well as the government payroll lending product.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the day-to-day activities of the Credit and Operations back-office team, allocate work and meet service targets.
• Monitor the loan processing journey from application to post-disbursement administration and fix bottlenecks and control weaknesses.
• Develop and maintain SOPs, checklists, process maps and operational controls in line with credit policies, product terms, delegated authorities and regulations.
• Track loan volumes, turnaround times, approval queues and disbursement performance, and escalate cases exceeding service standards.
• Work with Credit, Finance, ICT and Digital teams to resolve system issues and ensure maker-checker controls and exception handling are applied consistently.
• Coordinate the onboarding of sales agents, monitor their productivity and flag fraud indicators; maintain agent performance dashboards and reports.
• Supervise and coach Collections Administrators, the Customer Experience Administrator and the Recovery Officer, set priorities, run performance reviews and plan staffing.
• Monitor operational risks, disbursement documentation, collection and recovery reports, and support audits, risk assessments and regulatory inspections.
• Produce operational dashboards and reports, recommend efficiency improvements and give input to product reviews, budgeting and capacity planning.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, banking, business administration, operations management or a related field.
• At least five years of experience in banking, microfinance, digital lending, credit operations or financial services operations.
• At least two years in a supervisory, team leadership or operational coordination role.
• Demonstrated experience managing loan processing workflows, operational controls, reconciliations or service-level performance.
• Experience with core banking systems, loan management systems and digital credit decisioning platforms is highly desirable; experience with sales-agent networks, payroll lending or high-volume digital lending is an advantage.

Required skills

• Strong proficiency in Microsoft Excel and operational reporting tools.
• Operational planning, coordination and problem-solving.
• Knowledge of credit administration, digital lending and operational risk controls.
• Data interpretation and management reporting.
• Team leadership, coaching, stakeholder management and communication.