THE FUTURE IS HERE. BE PART OF THE PIONEERING TEAM OF PYYPL, THE FUTURE'S LEADING DIGITAL PAYMENT CARD AND MONEY TRANSFER COMPANY! 🚀

We are a pioneering FinTech company rolling out services in multiple countries in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia region.

Pyypl (pronounced “people”) has recently been selected in the Top 10 Start-up’s in the UAE for 2021 by LinkedIn. We are proudly regulated by various financial services regulators, and our Group Headquarters is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

We are a family of very experienced digital experts. We are a true product company, extremely results driven, and always try to positively surprise our customers. We want to hear that magical "wow!" from our customers.

As Pyypl continues to scale, we are looking for a Chief Financial Officer to help us scale our platform through the next big growth-phase.

What are we looking for?

Operations

Money/funds (fiat and virtual assets) need to be in the right place at the right time, so that operations/product never stops working. All key choke-points have a redundancy solution that switches on automatically/semi-automatically.

This requires sensitive management of partners: Strong relationship with senior people at our money-in, hold/custody, money-out partners. Pre-emptive communication is the key to avoid any surprises or panic at partners.

Practical considerations include smooth proactive handling of currencies, conversions, weekends/bank holidays, timezones (from US to Asia), sales team/distributor pre-funding, virtual assets, etc, many of which need to be operated 24/7. Making money move is surprisingly difficult in our region.

The CFO is a “strong operator” running the above setup where “things just work”.

Systems and Processes

Our financial infrastructure is complex and must be fully automated, and rules-based. Only in special cases manual entries/reconciliations are acceptable.

Our financial system consists of four main parts, which need to be multi-directionally integrated, and fully automated and reconcile perfectly without manual work:

1. Pyypl Core Platform/ledger: Organisations -> users&roles -> accounts (and limits) -> currencies -> products and pricing/fees/fx -> transactions -> commissions and bonuses
2. Partner systems: Money-in, Hold/Custody/Exchange, Money-out (+settlements between)
3. Data Platform/Aggregation (and “single source of truth” definitions)
4. Finance and HR systems: Input interface (for configs and rare manual entries), automated inventory/rules/controls/dimensions, outputs

We close month immediately based on Pyypl data systems, and during month adjust for any discrepancies with partner systems (if any).

Any system only works if the underlying processes are well-engineered and documented (and version controlled).

Key processes include:

1. Settlements with partners (done together with COO’s 24/7 finance operations resource)
2. Reversals/disputes/charge-backs (done together with COO’s 24/7 card operations resource)
3. Invoice/settlement (automated) reconciliation and immediate disputes/claw-backs
4. Automated alerts on unexpected financial peaks/dips and immediate 24/7 reaction/remediation (mainly by COO’s 24/7 monitoring processes)
5. Issuing “stock” (users, cards, loads, “virtual credit lines”) to employees and distribution partners, usually 24/7 and non-business hours (done together with COO’s 24/7 card operations resource)
6. Commission payments to employees/distributors, and bonuses/cashbacks to users (done together with COO’s 24/7 sales and distribution operations resource and Country Managers/organisations)
7. Up-to-date accounting policies and GL mapping (capturing all product/partner/country combinations in operation at that moment)

The absolute key requirement is that whatever is generated in Pyypl Core Platform, reflects automatically in accounting systems, and reconciles 100% between those two systems (and also with bank and partner balances) in realtime/near-realtime. So understanding deeply the Pyypl Platform and its latest changes is an absolute must.

The CFO is the passionate “product owner” for this setup: Builds it and continuously improves it.

Financial Resources

To operate $1bn+/year transaction volumes, while building out a regional company, the funds must be available in the right place at the right time, at low cost.

The CFO must have all these working and in optimal balance – and be the key contact point towards the providers to secure these funds.

1. Equity

Sufficient equity to build and grow the company to a multi-product, multi-market, multi-segment regional leader. Needs to intimately understand VC/PE investors and convey the Pyypl story to investors, investment banks and introducers.

2. Working Capital, Partner Liquidity and Collaterals

Moving from negative working capital to neutral or positive. Working capital requirements must not grow linearly with the business – quite the opposite: When the volumes grow, we must be able to take advantage of that.

We must also use partner funds to finance our working capital.

We have a suitable permanent solution for various collaterals we need to place.

3. Investor Relations

Both new and existing equity and debt investors require continuous interactive dialogue.

4. Revenue Assurance

At all times we must be 100% sure that we are collecting all revenues/fees in full.

We also must at all times know if we are “leaking money” somewhere – for example FX or arbitrage, fraud, technical problems, and similar.

These must be automated, with alerts – trying to monitor these manually means we will always be late.

5. Debt

For more structural and longer-term needs, we may need term loans, issue bonds, revolving credit lines, or similar.

6. Cashflow forecast

Since everything is automated and integrated, we will have a clear dashboard for cashflow forecast at all times (without having to prepare it manually).

7. Business forecast and visibility

Investors require accurate and defendable forecasts (which we need to meet or exceed). Forecasting must be based on true and up-to-date root drivers (new users, churn, # trx, $ trx value, revenue, direct costs, Gross Margin and CAC per active user, per market, per user segment). These root drivers must come directly from systems (not manually calculated) so that forecast is semi-automatically updated in the first days of each month. Variances between forecast and actuals (including the root drivers/assumptions) also need to be system-generated.

Group Setup, Accounting and Expenses/Profit Repatriation

Pyypl will be a 10-20 country operation + centralized core functions. We operate in a region with currency controls and high currency volatility. And we need to be IPO ready.

This means that all our entities must be standardised and integrated, with advanced dashboards, and rules based routing/transfer/accounting of funds.

All intra-entity agreements need to be so clear and suitable that withholding taxes, payments to group and similar work smoothly in practice, and enable quickly closing of accounts/audits. It is not realistic to do 10-20x manual country audits, it has to be done in a way that almost everything is automated and system-generated, and audits primarily focus on systems and policies rather than accounting entries.

Our “product” is not linked to a single entity/jurisdiction: One button/action in the same app may be provided from one jurisdiction/entity, while another action from another jurisdiction/entity. All these flows must be automated in accounting, settlements and audits.

Assets, IP and capex need to be allocated/recognized in the right (group) entity with clear rules/policies and automated recognition (including salaries-to-capex) and audit-suitable documentation. The work we do to build a globally connected approved and automated platform, has an immense value and needs to be reflected as such in assets.

Compliance

We have multiple regulators, with slightly varying requirements, so we need an automated system that tracks all the main KPIs that our regulators want to see at all times.

5.1 Client Money

It is a fundamental obligation to be able to know (and demonstrate from systems) exactly, at any time, where the Client Moneys are. We must be able to prove in the systems that it is impossible to commingle those with company moneys. This is particularly important with interchange income, FX mark-ups, partner pre-funding, cashbacks/charge-backs, and transaction and periodic partner expenses, as those could easily get mixed up with Client Moneys and must never do so.

5.2 Capital Adequacy and Liquidity

Each licensed/regulated activity (not necessarily per legal entity) has certain/multiple capital and liquidity requirement KPIs. These must be visible in systems at all times without manual work.

CFO takes accountability that across all our operations we are always able to demonstrate full compliance at any time.

Personal characteristics of Pyypl CFO:

This is not an accounting role. This role looks 10% backward and 90% forward.

This is a role that builds world-class systems, processes and automation in a complex multi-product, multi-market, multi-segment, multi-currency, multi-partner environment with currency controls, virtual assets, and constantly evolving legal and regulatory rules. To visualize the ambition, Pyypl’s finance department should be like a NASA Control Room during a space mission – while building a trustworthy and credible relationship with shareholders and investors.

Therefore the Pyypl CFO must be:

1. Commercial – Deeply understands how the product-partner combinations operate at any moment, and has all key “big numbers” on tip of the tongue at all times. Sees the forest from the trees. Intimately knows all root driver metrics (new users, churn, trx and $ per 30DAU, CAC per channel, etc). Understands what investors want.
2. Operational – Drops everything else if there’s a threat to product/operation quality. Extreme obsession for user experience. Rolls up sleeves and works with extreme sense of urgency in critical situations. Never says “I can’t impact that” but instead focuses on ensuring things just work.
3. Technical – ”Geeky” in a way that wants everything automated, and reconciling in real-time and loves system-generated alerts. Strongly feels that building this is not rocket science and has been done many times in other companies.
4. Credible – Oozes maturity and that has everything under control, towards partners, regulators, internal team, and investors. Excellent and credible proactive (not reactive) communicator to prevent any problems before they arise, and clearly explain the massive upside opportunity.