Strategic Finance Analyst

Strategic Finance Analyst | M-KOPA

You've built three-statement models under deadline pressure for deals that closed, got filed, and were forgotten within a quarter. What if the next model you build determined how a company gets 3 million more customers access to credit for the first time?

That's the actual trade-off on the table here.

M-KOPA has just crossed 7 million customers across Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, and South Africa, with more than $2 billion in credit unlocked
. Of those customers,
55% are accessing formal financial services for the first time
, and 86% report a real improvement in their quality of life
. We're not a mature business optimising at the margins — we're building the financial infrastructure for the next stage of that growth, from 5 million customers to 7 million, and now toward 10 million.

Every one of those growth milestones has to be modelled, stress-tested, and defended before it becomes a board decision. That's the job of the Strategic Finance team — we own the Long-Range Plan, the market entry business cases, and the analysis that sits behind what the CEO, COO, and board actually decide to do next. As the business scales into new markets and new products, that modelling work is only getting more complex, and more visible.

We need someone whose technical rigour can anchor it.

Most modelling roles either sit inside a bank, building work that ends at deal close, or inside a corporate finance function, running templates someone else designed years ago. This one is neither. You'll be building models from a blank sheet — for market entry decisions, unit economics, distribution cost structures, and funding scenarios — and you'll be doing it in direct partnership with the Head of Strategic Finance, on work streams that land in front of the CEO and the board within weeks, not quarters.

You stay as technical as you were in banking. You just get to see what your numbers actually build.

The core of the role is the company's Long-Range Plan — base, stretch, and market-specific upside/downside scenarios, with the assumptions packs and documentation that leadership and the board rely on. Beyond that, you'll build audit-ready models for special projects as they come up: a new market entry case one month, a distribution cost model the next, a funding analysis after that.

You'll be the person who catches the balance sheet or cash flow tie-out break before it reaches the CEO's desk, not after. And you'll support the monthly and quarterly FP&A cycle — budget-vs-actual variance, performance commentary, reporting packs — while helping migrate planning processes into Anaplan as the team scales its tooling across markets.

A good amount of this role is architecture before arithmetic: taking a half-specified problem and figuring out the right model structure before you touch a single formula.

• Demonstrable experience building complex, three-statement models from scratch under deadline pressure, ideally from an investment banking, transaction services, or similarly rigorous modelling background
• A genuine fluency in how operational drivers flow through to financial statements — you don't just build the model, you understand why each line moves the way it does
• Relentless attention to detail paired with the communication skill to defend your assumptions and explain your logic to someone who's never opened the model

It also helps — though isn't required — if you've worked with Anaplan or another planning platform, have exposure to fintech, lending, or consumer credit, or have worked across multi-currency, multi-entity African businesses.

This role moves between work streams — the Long-Range Plan one week, an ECL question the next, a market entry case after that — often with incomplete information and a deadline that doesn't move. You'll need to get productive on unfamiliar terrain fast, more than once. If that sounds exhausting rather than energising, this probably isn't your seat. If it sounds like exactly the kind of variety your current role doesn't give…