Financial Controller

About The Role

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the global month-end, quarter-end, and year-end close processes across multiple jurisdictions.
• Ensure accurate, timely, and compliant financial reporting under applicable accounting standards (IFRS / local GAAP), with particular rigour around financial instruments and loan portfolio accounting.
• Own the accounting for the loan book end to end, interest income recognition under the effective interest rate method, fee deferral, loan origination accounting, modifications, and derecognition.
• Own expected credit loss provisioning under IFRS 9, staging, model inputs and assumptions, governance of the ECL process, and clear articulation of movements to auditors and management.
• Manage and develop a small international finance team, fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Own the global audit process and coordinate relationships with external auditors, tax advisors, and regulatory bodies.
• Strengthen financial controls, governance frameworks, and risk management practices across the organisation.
• Oversee balance sheet integrity, reconciliations and accounting policy compliance.
• Support lender and debt-facility reporting, covenant compliance, and reconciliations between operational lending systems and the financial ledger.
• Partner closely with FP&A, Tax, Treasury, Credit/Risk, Legal, and business leaders to support strategic decision-making.
• Drive process improvement, automation, and finance transformation initiatives to enhance scalability and efficiency.
• Support M&A, integration projects, and corporate restructuring activities where required.
• Ensure compliance with local statutory, tax, and regulatory requirements across all operating entities.

Qualifications And Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, or a related discipline.
• Professional accounting qualification (CPA, ACA, ACCA, CA or equivalent).
• 8–12+ years of progressive finance and controllership experience.
• Prior experience in lending, consumer/SME credit, fintech lending, banking, or another financial-services environment where loan book accounting is core.
• Experience managing multi-entity, multi-currency international operations.
• Previous experience leading financial audits and working with external auditors, including defending technical judgements.
• Experience managing and developing finance teams.
• Comfortable working in Google Sheets, Oracle ERP Experience.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

Who You Are

• This role is built for someone who is energised by building, not just maintaining.
• You will fit in well if you are:
• A self-starter who sees what needs doing and gets on with it, without waiting to be told.
• Comfortable in the chaos, you can walk into ambiguity, untangle it, and figure things out where there's no playbook yet.
• Highly motivated and driven, with a strong personal standard for getting things right.
• A positive, can-do thinker who keeps the team steady and focused when things get intense.

Company Overview

• Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers.
• Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
• Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.
• Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL.
• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit.
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand.
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services
• As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing.
• Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets.
• This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure.
• But it doesn’t end there.
• We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.