Background:
Karandaaz Pakistan (“Company”), is a not for profit company, set up by Department for International Development UK (“DFID”) for the implementation of the Enterprise and Asset Growth Programme. The company was incorporated in August 2014. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (“BMGF”) has set up a Digital Financial Services Unit within Company for increasing the reach of financial services through the use of innovative digital technologies. The objectives for DFS unit, all of which are aimed at poor, rural, or otherwise excluded population segments are to: 1) Drive government payments onto digital platforms and develop new digital payment use cases for the public sector; 2) Work with commercial providers to test new digital payment innovations; 3) Conduct regulatory and policy analysis and advocacy to address the remaining policy barriers to digital financial inclusion; and 4) Create public goods to accelerate diffusion of best practices.
The National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) is a state-owned bank with headquarters in Karachi, Pakistan. Operating as a Commercial Bank; NBP mainly acts as a trustee for Public Funds and an agent for country’s regulator, State Bank of Pakistan (SBP). NBP has a branch network of over 1400 branches, spread across the country and entertains almost 20 million walk-in customers on annual basis mostly conducting cash-based transaction at the bank.
NBP transacts over PKR 5 trillion on annual basis on Government to Person (G2P) and Person to Government (P2G) payment transactions. In addition, more than PKR 2.4 trillion worth of transactions are processed annually in the account of national & regional tax payments (i.e. FBR, PRA etc.), Government employees’ salaries & pension disbursements, utility bill payments, passport issuance & renewal fees and traffic tickets etc. In an effort to minimize cash based transactions, increase financial inclusion, reduce delivery costs, cut leakages, improve transparency and to diminish the possibility of G2P payments to ghost recipients; Karandaaz Pakistan (KRN) is engaging the services of an external consultancy company to conduct thorough study and devise detailed strategy & roadmap for digitizing NBP’s end-to-end transactions flow.
Karandaaz Pakistan is seeking services of an individual consultant who will provide project management support to NBP & Karandaaz Pakistan. The consultant will be based in Lahore with frequent travel to Islamabad and Karachi. This position will require (but not limited to) him/her to function in the following areas:
- Determine Point Of Contact at NBP for each vertical and determine level/complexity of data available.
- Act as a liaison between NBP, Karandaaz and other partners/consultants.
- Facilitate the project team/consultants with access to resource information at NBP, including:
- Historical NBP’s transactional data trends
- NBP’s transactional architecture & flowcharts
- Use case scenarios
- Others
- Work alongside with the consultants to define current state, conduct fit-gap analysis and assist in future state payments infrastructure.
- With respect to co-implementing partners and external project implementing consultants/ sub- contractors:
- ensure that these agencies mobilize and deliver the outputs in accordance with their letters of agreement or contracts
- Provide overall supervision and/or coordination of their work to ensure the production of the expected outputs.
- Assist the consultants in drafting the recommendations, strategy documents, probable risks & issues and implementation plan.
- Assist the consultants to conduct review of the strategy recommendations with NBPs subject matter experts (SME) and alter the strategy document according to on-ground realities.
- Assist the consultants, by scheduling project steering committee meeting to include top management of Karandaaz, NBP and other stakeholders, to present finalized strategy document for review and approval.
- Act as the main point of contact for the selected consultants and assist the with the onboarding process.
- Liaison between the Karandaaz and the consultants for logistical arrangements.
Deliverables:
- Regular project progress report on an agreed format and frequency
- Documentation of Project steering committee
- Data gathering & sorting of NBP data sets as per the requirements of the project
Qualifications
- At least a Master’s degree in Economics, Accounting & finance, Statistics
- A minimum of total 6 years of professional experience including mobile money, digital financial services, banking.
- Ability to interact and work with senior level government officials and private business professionals in banks and telcos
- Demonstrable experience of development and implementation of new business models and digital financial products
- Experience of designing and implementing complex projects or providing consulting support in the implementation of complex projects
- Experience of developing innovative payment solutions to extend the reach of financial services to unbanked populations
DEADLINE:
- Note: Interested individuals, with a deep understanding of the digital financial services industry (mobile money, branchless banking, payment services etc), can send their CVs to [email protected] mentioning the position title in the subject line.
- Application deadline for the position is October 23rd, 2016.