Senior Program Officer, Digital Payment Platforms

The Inclusive Financial Systems (IFS) team believes that valuable, low-cost financial products have the potential to offer a pathway out of poverty, and that digital financial systems can enable the private sector’s delivery of such products to the poor sustainably and at scale. IFS supports the buildout of inclusive digital financial services (DFS) systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by (i) enabling the right policy and regulatory environment, (ii) supporting the implementation of inclusive instant payments systems, (iii) driving scale and economic sustainability by promoting pro-poor use cases; and (iv) closing the gender gap in the usage of formal financial products. 

Applications accepted until 5 PM PT on Wednesday, March 5, 2025.

Your Role

Inclusive instant payment systems (IIPS) have enabled financial inclusion in numerous low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). These platforms, ran as digital public infrastructure, enable interoperability of wallets and bank accounts for person-to-person (P2P) payments, and enable added use cases such as Government-to-person (G2P), person-to-merchant (P2M) and others. The ultimate success – people using financial services daily – hinges on the quality of the digital offering as measured by affordability, usefulness, security, and availability of services to the newly connected customers. This work is part of aggressive targets for adoption of digital financial services across Africa and Asia. This is an exciting new full-time role with a competitive salary and benefits, located in Seattle, WA.

We are looking for an experienced digital payments expert, with a proven track record in managing technology strategy, operations, scalability and growth of payment platforms in the Global South. This Senior Program Officer (SPO) will seek to:

• lead the development of principles and criteria for payment platform operators (PPO) and digital financial service providers (DFSP) that increase quality in digital financial inclusion ;
• provide a measurement framework to support these principles and track progress across payment platform deployments;
• support Payment Processor Operators (PPOs) and Digital Financial Service Providers (DFSPs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), through grants and capacity building, to implement these principles in their offerings; and
• support global standard setting bodies and other global influencers to craft global standards and guidance that advances quality in financial services, while protecting consumers and preserving the safety and soundness of financial systems.

What You’ll Do:

• Refine the IFS’s team’s global digital payment strategy by leading the definition of principles, guidelines and safeguards that insure the provision of affordable, useful, secure and available digital financial services.
• Drive the design and building of center-of-excellence facilities to engage PPOs and DFSPs in a collaborative dialogue to define principles and guidelines that ensure quality of digital financial services in terms of affordability, usefulness, security, and availability.
• Contribute with global and regional bodies to identify and advocate for safeguards that ensure inclusiveness of digital financial services
• Identify customer onboarding mechanisms which can expand access to welfare-enhancing financial products, while also combatting fraud and money laundering;
• Identify policies and regulations which can enable previously excluded women to access and use welfare-enhancing financial services.
• Identify and assess policies, rules and technologies that incentivize shared platform services
• Support proper rules for outsourced services such as “payment platform in the cloud” or “DPI in the cloud” and cloud computing which balance opportunity and sovereignty risks
• Engage cloud providers in formulating proper cloud services that guarantee sovereignty and ownership of country/regional partners
• Lead a measurement framework to assess the quality of services provided by PPOs and DFSPs
• Build, in a collaborative engagement with PPOs and DFSPs, a measurement framework for tracking the quality of their offerings.
• Build and manage a tool that tracks payment platform’s quality over time.

Build and manage grants, contracts, and other interventions to assist PPOs and DFSPs in implementing the principles and measurements mechanisms the above principles and measurements strategy.  This require to candidate to:  

• Identify critical gaps in the PPO and DFSP landscape;
• Identify and evaluate partners to fill those gaps;
• Align with the selected partners on a shared set of outcomes;
• Work with the selected partners to co-design proposals, budgets, and delivery landmarks to advance the desired outcomes;
• Manage the implementation of projects and identifying course corrections that can enhance their impact;
• Conduct field visits to observe the on-ground implementation of projects;

Provide advice to IFS Program Officers and their grantees about how to advance key regulatory elements of their projects.  This includes: 

• Partner with the IFS team’s digital merchant lead to inform merchant policies and regulations which expand access to merchant offerings among excluded population segments.
• Partner with foundation teams outside IFS, such as Agricultural Development and Women’s Economic Empowerment, to inform the digital payments aspects of their strategies.
• Provide clear, concise, and insightful written analyses and recommendations for investments and team strategy.
• Support IFS Program Officers to develop strong regulatory policy work plans in each IFS country strategy;
• Co-design country regulatory investments along with IFS country leads;
• Engage directly with financial regulators in IFS priority countries to inform their regulatory policies;
• Review and comment on draft countries’ DFS regulations.

Your Experience

• Advanced degree (or equivalent experience) in technology, payments, regulations, finance or related fields
• Strong experience in the provision of digital financial systems in LMICs (e.g. mobile money in Africa, UPI, Pix, Raast, etc).
• Exposure to fraud management technology
• Strong network of relationships in the field of digital financial services
• Experience in marketing of digital financial services
• Experience in large program management
• Strong communications (written and oral) skills and persuasive public speaking competence
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a cooperative and collegial fashion;
• Innovative, out-of-the box problem solver who is hands-on and willing to go as deep or broad as necessary to achieve outcomes;
• Exceptional results orientation combined with strong relationship management skills;
• Fluent in English

Source: https://gatesfoundation.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Gates/job/Seattle-WA/Senior-Program-Officer–Digital-Payment-Platforms_B020807-1